The Ellipse
by Marquis Carabas
Summary: A followup to 'Wells Street Station'.  Fifteen years on, Coraline, Wybie, and Maria are still united, and what was once their hobby has become their job.  But even as they fight on all fronts, conspiracies unwind around them, and new enemies emerge.
1. Chiaroscuro

**Disclaimer: Do I _look_ like Neil Gaiman?**

**This follows on from my earlier story 'Wells Street Station'. If you haven't already, I'd advise reading it before starting this one, as this uses original characters and refers to plot points from that story.**

**As always, any constructive criticism will be gratefully accepted. **

* * *

><p><em>'The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.'<br>_- H. L. Mencken

* * *

><p>Through a tunnel, there was a door, and through that door, there was a room.<p>

It was a wide, low-ceilinged room, lit by guttering gas-lamps along the walls. They threw the room into aspects of deep, golden light and fluttering shadow, playing over the old-fashioned chests of drawers and low sofas. Pristine gold and cream colours predominated, clashing against dark mahogany.

It looked warm and homely, like an elderly and much-used living room. But from inside, there was a subtle, polluted texture to the air. And if you looked in a large mirror that hung from the middle of one wall, you would have seen the room in lifeless shades of black and grey, choked over with dust and cobwebs.

The door sat at one end. At the other, a monster loomed over a child.

"Be good for your mother," crooned the monster. She had the lower body of some hideous spider, four metal legs digging into the golden carpet. Her upper body was human in shape, with her torso covered by a ragged cream velvet gown. Her hair was a mass of yellow ringlets, and her button eyes gleamed with a goldtone glint. Her mouth was curved into a ghastly smile, her teeth gleaming like metal shards. Her hands were skeletal and metallic, and held a needle and spool of thread.

"Please, let me _go_," wept the child, pressing himself further into the far wall, as if seeking to push himself through to safety. "I want to go home."

"You are home," said the beldam. "I'm going to look after you for ever and always. Haven't I been good to you so far?"

The unconvinced child kept trying to shy away, in whatever room he had left to go. The beldam tutted with impatience.

"Very well," she said, pressing the needle closer towards the child's face. "If I must be crude about this..."

She was cut off suddenly by a ferocious bang from the little door on the opposite site of the wall, which rocked on its hinges. The beldam hissed and turned, while the child looked past her with wide eyes.

"_What?_" snarled the beldam. "An intruder?"

There was another crash from the door, and it was sharply bent in down the middle, nearly broken. Then there was another bang, and it flew off its hinges and landed several feet away on the floor.

From the darkness of the tunnel, a stooping figure emerged, peeling away from the shadows. It rose and stood, standing in one of the patches of deepest shadow. All that the beldam could make out was that it was garbed in some heavy coat, and that it held some long, gleaming stick in its hand.

"I'm giving you five seconds to let that kid go," said the figure. It had a woman's voice, a little rough and full of force. It hefted the stick it bore, which didn't identify itself as a shotgun to the Beldam's inexperienced eyes.

"You _dare_ to intrude upon _my_ domain and threaten _my_ hunt?" the beldam screeched, her hackles rising, her face splitting into an ugly sneer, her hands spreading. "I will rip your name from your dying throat, _scum!_" She span away from the child with her full body, and threw herself into a unnaturally quick scuttle along the ground. Her fingers and leg points gleamed as she ran. The shadowed woman tensed, keeping her shotgun levelled at the beldam.

The beldam leapt – and then the shotgun roared with a shout of fire, hitting into the beldam's midriff in mid-air, and sending her flying back across the floor. The child screamed with the sudden noise, and the woman walked forward at a brisk pace. Her hazel eyes caught the fire from the lamps, and blazed under a peaked cap.

Mad with pain, the beldam struck up with her sharp hand, up at the woman's arm. Her claws cut into the fabric, but glanced almost immediately off something hard and bitterly cold to the touch, and the creature was forcefully shoved away. The shotgun stock blurred out – once, twice, thrice – and connected with brutal blows to the chest and head that sent the beldam tumbling across the room towards the other wall. The child scrambled out of the way, and watched with wide and terrified eyes.

The beldam lay, choking and recumbent, and the woman pressed the blued-steel nozzle of the shotgun into the creature's head of curly hair. She panted, and her mouth curved into a satisfied smile even as her eyes bored into the beldam, her finger trembling against the gun's trigger. She forced herself to look away, and met the child's gaze.

"Go home, kid. Your mom and dad are worrying themselves sick," she said softly. The child immediately took her advice, and looked back once, fleetingly, before running back through the open door.

The beldam coughed up tarry blood, and looked up at the woman. One of her hands went slowly to the wound in her lower torso, and she bent her head painfully around to look at it.

She saw the glint of an cold iron slug in the wound.

"You … know of the bane?" she whispered.

"I've done my homework," said the woman coolly. The beldam looked at her with disbelief.

"Very few of humans know of us, let alone our weaknesses." Then a spasm of retching and coughing took her, and when she looked up, she said quietly "Please, end it. It _hurts_."

"It's not as bad as it feels," said the woman. "I used an alloyed round. It'll hurt like hell, and leave you wounded for a long time, but I doubt it'll certainly kill you unless I help it along." Her eyes narrowed. "I want answers to some questions."

"What … what questions?"

The woman stepped closer, the dark fabric of her midnight blue trench coat catching the golden light. Her face suggested a woman in her mid-twenties, youthful but with emerging maturity and wisdom. Her face was pale and heart-shaped, with a sharply pointing nose. Two long, sharply-defined scars ran along her left cheek, atop each other. Blue hair fell out from under her cap and ended at her shoulders.

"How long have you been here? How long have you been preying on children?"

"I-I only started recently. That one was to be my first. I'd fed before, a sip here and there, but never a complete soul before. Never a life."

"If you're wise, you'll restrict yourself to sips. If I find you again and discover you've been feeding, I won't be merciful."

"I won't feed, I swear," hissed the beldam, the steel nozzle of the shotgun pressing into her head. "Not after this. Please, don't kill me."

"Of course – if you answer some more questions. Are there any others like you in this area? Any beldams?"

The beldam shook her head.

"What about other species? Other predators of the Sur-real. Any horlas, ragamolls, seelie or unseelie?"

The beldam stared with mounting confusion.

"Who _are_ you?" she said. "Who are you that knows about this? About us?"

The woman hefted the shotgun and supported it under her arm. With her free hand, she dipped into a pocket and drew out a button. It was a plastic facsimile, white with a red trim. She threw it at the beldam's feet, and it clattered on the floor.

The beldam looked down at it with shock, and then all her confusion transmuted to terror when she looked back up at the woman. She looked much as the child had done only a few minutes ago.

"It's you," she said with cold dread. "The Stormcrow."

"You beldams keep calling me that for what happened in Chicago, I've noticed," said the woman dryly.

The beldam hung her head. "What do you want?" she asked.

"For starters," said Coraline Jones, Secretary of the United States Department of the Supernatural, "I want the truth."


	2. Ramshackle

It was raining over Washington DC; a steady sapping downpour that conspired with the cold night to keep the sane and sensible indoors. Not that this stopped the streets bustling with people and traffic.

The city never slept. People worked under clear skies and stormclouds, under dim streetlamps and in dimmer office blocks, amongst labyrinths of rundown housing and in echoing capitol buildings. Workers worked, presidents presided, politicians politicked. Rich and poor and the powerful and powerless rarely rubbed shoulders.

In the White House, President Kuciyela sat at his desk and combed through reports on potential security compromises in the new fusion plants in Michigan. In Nebraska Avenue, the new Secretary of Homeland Security was, with little fanfare, being sworn in. In the Capitol, Congress thrashed out, by torturous degrees, reform on the NASA budget.

And in the Thaddeus Complex, a small and spare office complex crouched on the edge of Capitol Hill, Maria Ortega counted to ten under her breath as she directed a pointed look at the computer on her desk.

"Go on," she implored it. "Is it so hard to finish the search? I'm not asking for the world. I just want as-yet unresolved cases of missing people in Delaware, complete with locations and dates."

The bar indicating progress trawling through the sleek machine's multiple databases flickered hesitantly. It skipped forward a hair, and Maria's hopes rose.

Then it skipped back the hair, and it was only with a heroic effort of will that Maria resisted the urge to grab her umbrella from the stand in the corner of her office and start hewing about her until the computer had been reduced to its constituent molecules.

"I don't care how advanced you are," she said in a warning tone. "You aren't sentient. 'You shall not kill' doesn't apply to you yet. I only mention this in passing."

The computer deigned not to respond, save for looking intolerably smug.

It was a slim, dark machine, a mirror of the woman staring it down. Maria was slender and tall, dark-skinned and black-haired, her dark brown eyes enlarged by round spectacles. She wore a red skirt to her ankles, and a red cardigan over a white t-shirt. She was twenty-six years old, and had spent the past four of these years in the Department.

Her office, large as it was, also did service as the complex's hallway. Maria sat facing the door from behind a dark wooden desk. The seal of the Department of the Supernatural was set into the wall behind her; a upright arm holding a blazing torch against a dark field.

The sound of raindrops pelting the large curtained window to Maria's right obscured the throttle of a vehicle that was pulling up. It took the sound of a key clicking in the doorway to make Maria look up.

It was Coraline who had entered, along with a sharp gust of wind from the cold March night, and she nudged the door shut with her foot as she walked in. She set down a black backpack and a long zipped case containing her shotgun on the floor, and pulled off her damp trenchcoat, revealing her dry dark jeans and blue pullover. She wiped her damp boots on the doormat, and hung her coat and hat on pegs set into the plaster-white walls. She whistled as she did so.

Maria looked askance at her. "I take it _someone_ had a good day at work?"

"What makes you think that?"

Maria looked her up and down. "You're alive, for one thing. But you've also got a spring in your step, a smile skirting your face, and you're whistling 'Zippity Doo Dah'. But apart from that, nothing really."

"That's you putting your investigatory skills to work, I can tell."

"I have to put them to work on _something_." Maria gestured at her computer. "While you've been out gallivanting with monsters from beyond, I've been busy discovering new depths of loathing for this. And I don't know what Wybie's been doing, but I'm pretty sure I heard an explosion a few minutes ago."

"Ah? I'd better go and check on him."

"You do that." Maria looked at Coraline critically. "Just for the record, the mission did go well, didn't it? You encountered the beldam?"

"I did. And I got there in time to save a kid as well."

"That's great. And what did you do to the beldam?"

"She hadn't killed any kid. I let her off with a warning and a stomach ache. She won't be doing any feeding for a good while, and I asked her a few questions, like you asked. She hinted that there was another up in Massachusetts."

"Nothing more specific than that?"

"Afraid not. But I'm sure you've got any number of leads for me."

"If there's something I don't lack, it's ways in which you can get yourself killed." Maria glanced back at her computer. "Give me another glacial aeon or two and I might even have something concrete for you."

"That's good to know." Coraline held up the backpack. "I've written up a case file for Wybie. He'll want to get it filed."

"He's in the lab with the cat and the intern, I think," said Maria, jerking a thumb back along the corridor. "I'd imagine there's science in progress."

"Isn't there always? You hold the fort here. I'll be back soon to lock my stuff up."

Maria waved her through, then looked up and frowned as if remembering something, and turned to Coraline's back.

"Oh, a message came through," said Maria. "Just to remind you that there'll be a cabinet meeting tomorrow."

"God dammit," said Coraline. "And the day was going so well."

* * *

><p>Coraline walked briskly along the corridors of the Thaddeus Complex, finding her way to Wybie's workstation.<p>

This was a task easier said than done.

The Thaddeus complex had been built at the height of the Cold War, by an architect who had somehow gotten it into his head that a mass invasion and occupation by the USSR was imminent. Therefore, he had deliberately made the layout as bewildering and illogical as possible, so as to baffle any Red Army troops who might have wandered inside for a quick smoke. Corridors looped and twisted and led in on themselves. Superfluous rooms abounded, multiple entryways leading somehow to different floors and short curved corridors that led back into the same room. Other doors opened onto brick walls, others onto the outside of the building.

The whole thing was an exercise in architectural madness, and it had only seen limited use before being left to moulder for half a century; before finally being palmed off onto the Department of the Supernatural.

So focused was Coraline upon not getting lost, that she almost bumped into someone coming the other way.

"Sorry, Sayid, didn't see you there," she said. She then asked "There have been rumours of an explosion. Dare I enquire further?"

The intern for the Department of the Supernatural was Sayid Pahlavi, a fresh-faced student with a sanguine demeanour, tanned skin, wiry black hair, and large, bright, blue-green eyes. He was, at five feet three, only a little taller than Coraline herself, and at twenty-one years old, five years younger, and wore a thin red long-sleeved t-shirt, jeans, and a constant smile.

"According to Mr Lovat, the path of scientific progress is riddled with fire and scorched shards of metal and the odd misplaced limb." Sayid seemed to consider it. "Which doesn't really fit with the accepted view of science, I believe. But what do I know."

"Oh, god. What went on fire?"

"Nothing irreplaceable, I've been told to tell you. Er, you don't look reassured."

Coraline, resisting the urge to bash her head repeatedly against a suitable wall, answered "I'll take what reassuring I can get. Shouldn't you be off the clock by now?"

"Technically, yes. But I was having fun here."

"You have a very twisted view of what constitutes fun. Go home and get some rest. I've just got some things to sort out."

Sayid nodded and moved on. Coraline did likewise.

As she drew nearer to Wybie's lab, along white-washed walls and dark-carpeted floors, another member of the department fell into step beside her. She didn't notice them until she glanced down at the floor.

"Hello, Tripod." She knelt down briefly to rub their ears. "Have you been managing the idiots while I've been away?"

Tripod _mwwr_ed at the attention and pressed himself against her hand. He was a scarred, reddish-furred, amber-eyed Turkish Angora, who spent most of his days hobbling around the Thaddeus complex and the surroundings on his three legs.

He had been the Department's mascot for a little over a year, ever since he had been taken in as a crippled stray. Hitherto, he had ruled the alleyways of the capitol like a petty tyrant, lording it over other cats and strays for several years. Fate had caught up with him, however, when he had picked a fight with the Rottweiler belonging to the visiting Polish President. He had lost a leg, but not before he had sent the dog yelping for its handlers, and sparked a minor diplomatic incident.

Now he lived in relative comfort and security with the Department, even if, from time to time, Wybie often tried some cryptic experiment to induce speech.

Speaking of which; Coraline picked herself up and kept on walking. Tripod hobbled after her.

As she neared the back of the building, she picked up the acrid scent of something burnt. She walked faster, past posters with an inverted crown proclaiming NOW PANIC AND FREAK OUT, and handwritten signs proclaiming _Science in progress, run for your life_.

She finally came to a plain green door, set into the white wall. She tried the handle, and let herself in.

"Wybie?" she said.

The room Wybie had set up shop was large and rectangular, lit during the day by a skylight, and lit now by large circular lights set into the walls. The walls were plain and drab, save for the odd scorch-mark or blistered stain set into them. The wall facing Coraline was plastered with whiteboards filled with diagrams and sheets of pinned-up paper riddled with equations and notation. Large, long workstations ran along the two side walls. They were long, clean, iron-grey metal desks, heavy with drawers, topped with the organised chaos that was Wybie's work. Piles of paper were sunk amidst toppling towers of electronics, wires splayed around them like rivers between mountains. Small, smoky glass jars sat atop several of them, scribbled-on sticky notes adorned some of them like feathers, a catalogue of failures and near-successes.

One particularly recent failure sat on the station on the right, smeared with foam and stuck powder, trickling oily smoke. It was a small cuboid, pieced and welded together from metal and wires and unfathomable electric components. From its sides, two long cords of coated wire extended, that could in theory have been joined together if the ends hadn't been fused into solid lumps of melted plastic and metal.

In the centre of the room, a more recent and significantly more intact version of the same machine sat sprawled, smaller wires connecting it to sockets in the wall, and the two longer cords joined and arranged into a circle on the floor. Above it, Wybie looked down, peering at it critically, taking notes on a pad of note-paper.

He looked up, saw Coraline, and brightened beneath the mask.

"Alright, take seventeen of the Reality-Eroder," he said, still taking notes, "I think it can wait. Is that paperwork? For _me_?"

Puberty had been kind to Wybie. A few weeks after it, whatever problem had existed in his back had finally been deemed to have been fixed, and his back brace had been removed.

And after _that_, his growth spurt had set in with a vengeance.

Coraline was five foot one, genetics having rolled in favour of her mother and hence doomed her to a lifetime of short jokes. Wybie had only stopped growing at six-and-a-half feet, and was broad across the shoulders and chest. His dark green eyes were bright and clear, and his hair was now accompanied by a straggly, curly beard. Over his frame was draped something that had started life as a labcoat, but had been so relentlessly resewn and patched and reinforced that it now probably qualified as armour.

"You're lucky I like you," said Coraline, rummaging inside her backpack for the case file. "I don't endure writing up paperwork for just _anyone_, you know."

"So I'm a special snowflake in that regard?" Wybie reached for the file with a gloved hand.

"You're special, certainly. Don't take that as a compliment." Coraline walked with Wybie to one of the drawers in one of his workstations. Wybie yanked it open with a clatter, and produced a massive binder, stuffed with sheets of paper in plastic pockets. He shifted through them, past pages of drawn pictures, blurred photographs, and several other case files. He finally found a relevant section, and slipped the file inside an empty pocket. Physical storage was for the best. Many an innocent computer had met a grisly end on these tables, and Wybie had eventually given up.

Coraline had turned her attention to the mess on the rightmost station, covering her nose slightly against the smoke.

"Scientific progress goes 'Fizzle fizzle kaboom' in this case?" said Coraline.

"Ah. _That_ would not be my proudest moment right there. But I think I know where I went wrong."

"At least it's progress," said Coraline, surveying the carnage. "Can I guess from the fact that Tripod's still alive and intact that he wasn't in when you tested it?"

"Oh, come on. You know I _never_ put him in for a first or second testing," said Wybie, kneeling to pet the cat. "Don't I, you fuzzy little sociopath?"

"Mrreeew," said the fuzzy little sociopath, which could have been Grimalkin for _That's one principle you adhere to, at least_ or _Whatever you say, human_ or _And I thank my stars daily for whatever solitary cell of common sense rattling around in your skull knocked that notion into your head_. Grimalkin was a nuanced language.

And if Wybie ever produced a functioning Eroder, the Department would be able to understand it.

Amongst lots of other consequences.

"In any case, I now have something that I think will work. I mean, I'm reasonably sure it's not actually going to go on fire this time. Although since it's best to just play it safe, could you stand back and keep Tripod with you?"

Coraline did so, holding the reluctant Tripod while Wybie made a last few adjustments to the device on the floor. She watched him and smiled.

The work they did was hard, but necessary, she knew. Their Department was small and underfunded. _Critically_ underfunded. They were lucky when they had money for travel. They were unappreciated, unsupported, and had been regarded as a national joke or national embarrassment for all of their four-year existence.

And 'they' in this case referred to the entire Department. Herself, Wybie, Maria, the intern, and a three-legged cat.

But sometimes, the work they did in this building made it possible for her to forget the problems, and just see the pluses.

Wybie stood up and grabbed for a blast mask on the floor behind him, just in case.

"Ready?" he asked, slipping on the mask. "Fingers crossed."

He flipped the switch on the machine.

In theory, what would happen was that the reality within the cord-circle would be weakened. The Sur-real could bleed through, and the consequences (such as cats talking) could grant legitimacy to the Department of the Supernatural.

In reality, what happened was this.

The machine gurgled slightly.

A faint chattering came from the Sur-real specimen within the metal.

A few uncomfortable seconds passed.

Then, just as Wybie was about to speak, the column of air within _twisted_ – it blurred and shifted, like the inside of a tornado, for one split second. The air in the room buzzed, and a faint honeysuckle smell hit Coraline's nostrils.

Then the machine shorted out, with a spray of sparks blasting out part of the frontispiece, and the cuboid fell onto its side. The cords jerked like serpents, then fell still.

And the only sound afterwards was of something small and hitherto unnoticed falling from the ceiling with a metallic tinkle.

Wybie looked for the source of the noise, and noticed it on the floor; a small shape that looked vaguely like a metal spider. It lay still save for the odd spasm, and he approached it gingerly.

"What is that?" said Coraline. Tripod hissed at it, and wriggled in her grasp. Wybie drew out tweezers from a pocket in his coat and poked at it. Its legs clutched onto the tweezers' arms, and grasped them firmly. Wybie raised it to the light.

"I … it's not mine," he said, baffled and curious.


	3. Rigmarole

They sat around a round table, in a room which served as a break area. A fridge and a kettle and several jars sat on a counter in one corner, and thick curtains were drawn across the windows. Rain still pattered without.

Coraline and Maria watched while Wybie examined the little device on the table. He held a magnifying glass in one hand, through which he peered closely at the metal spider, his mouth pursed with concentration. In his other hand, he held a wooden spoon.

Finally he sat up, placing down the magnifying glass, and suddenly rapped the wooden spoon sharply on the table. Coraline and Maria saw the spider lurch to its limbs and scuttle drunkenly in the direction of the spoon.

"Huh," said Wybie, impressed. "I've never seen anything like this before. Audio-seeking, recording, mobility, and unobtrusiveness in one package. I mean, I know things like this exist, but I just haven't seen one. God, I'd give anything to open it up, but it might have been fitted with anti-sabotage capacities. But if I could get past those..."

"Wybie?" said Coraline, waving a hand to get his attention. "Pretend I'm a big, dumb trouble-shooter who doesn't know what that is. What _is_ it?"

"This? It's a spy," said Wybie. He rapped the wooden spoon on the table again, and the device lurched once again in its direction.

"See? It's made to record sound, so whenever it detects a noise, it moves towards it, so it can get a better recording position. Hence, audio-seeking. And these little limbs -" He flipped it onto its back with the spoon with one deft move, and the device scrabbled at the air with short metal limbs. "-_These_ give it a heck of a lot of mobility. You could put it anywhere in a building, and it could move anywhere out of the way. Walls, ceilings, whatever. Heck, I'd bet several major internal organs that this thing could be controlled remotely."

The thing twitched at Wybie every time he spoke. Coraline looked at it with no small amount of apprehension.

"And look. This thing's not much bigger than a normal spider, and it doesn't shine at all. I'd never have noticed it if I hadn't tested No. Seventeen, and triggered whatever sort of short-range pulse that was. And it's pretty sturdy. Its microprocessors must have taken a hell of a hammering, but it's still sort of functioning."

"There were other devices in the building that got a little shock from No. Seventeen," said Maria dryly. "The computer I was working at, for example."

"I _said_ I was sorry."

"Just so long you appreciate that, if my machine hadn't automatically backed itself up, I would have been obliged to kill you horribly."

"Noted." Wybie absently rapped the spoon on the table and watched the spy wriggle. "It's advanced. Again, I know these sorts of things exist, but I also know they're not exactly the sort you get free in a cereal box. I don't actually think they're on the civilian market. Like, at all."

"Government issue?" asked Coraline, looking straight at the spy.

"I think so."

"I see," said Coraline slowly. Then, "So what the hell was one doing in your lab?"

There was a silence around the table.

"Obviously, since none of us put it there, it had to be a third party," said Maria. "That suggests someone broke in and put it there."

"All the entryways are blocked up at night," said Wybie. "And there's not really any gaps small enough for this to get in by itself."

"However it got in, someone was trying to maintain surveillance on us," said Maria patiently. "Coraline, when you're at the cabinet meeting tomorrow, drop this in the lap of the FBI director or someone. Even if it's us, they can't ignore someone stealing government tech and breaking into government offices. They'll be able to handle it."

Coraline kept her eye on the spy.

"Why us?" she said. "What have we got here?"

* * *

><p>If you had told the Coraline of fifteen years ago that she would one day attend the meetings of the most powerful people in the country, she would have most likely replied "Yeah, right."<p>

If you had told her the same thing today, she would have replied "Thanks for reminding me, asshole."

Her government ID card got her past security and the White House reception, out of the cold day made grey and wet by rainclouds. She stepped through lengths of carpeted corridor briskly, with the air of old, unwelcome routine.

As she entered the West Wing, she heard the sound of work all around her, the sound of hushed conversations and clacking keys from behind office doors and from the desks of countless secretaries and aides and staff members. People talked as they walked, juggling coffee and folders and phonecalls.

It buzzed. It crackled with conversation and politics, little of which interested her. The rich colours of the walls and fine furnishings no longer distracted her. Whatever novelty had existed in entering the White House on a semi-regular basis had faded fast for her.

In her bag, she had the spy. It had been thoroughly examined and thoroughly deactivated by Wybie, after it had been agreed that bringing an active recording device left by an unknown party to a cabinet meeting might not be such a hot idea. Deactivation had consisted of several short, sharp shocks against a surface, followed by a thorough blitzing with electrons, and it had seemed to work.

As she made her way to the Cabinet Room, the first person she bumped into was a stout man with dark eyes set in a deathly pallor; Lukas Montjoy, the Secretary of Space.

They exchanged nods for courtesy's sake, but no more than that before they kept on walking. Courtesy was as much as her Department could hope for.

Montjoy peeled away for a brief conversation with an incoming aide, leaving Coraline alone. She was near the Cabinet Room now, she knew; just a couple more turns in the corridor until...

"...And make sure that Silverman gets the memo and understands it. I'm not leaving that deal to chance," came an all-too familiar and acerbic tone.

Well, of course. It was an immutable law of the universe that any crap situation in which she found herself would be worsened before it got better, and _here_, thought Coraline, was just the man for the job.

She rounded a corner and met the chilly, steel-grey eyes of Malcolm Skirving, the Chief of Staff for the President. Skirving could, if Coraline was feeling ungenerous (and she frequently was) be compared to an wizened and anaemic vulture. He was small of frame, crowned with thin white hair, sharp-featured, and treated his friends in the same caustic manner as he treated his enemies, a state which granted him few of the former and plenty of the latter.

He glanced at Coraline, and then dropped his gaze to the report in his hand.

"Absolutely unnecessary," he said, flipping the pages, pretending to go through the report with the stern-looking aide at his side. "Unjustifiable. Ill-conceived. Simply pointless. A drain on federal funds that will return _nothing_, and yet somehow finds the support to persist." Then he closed the report and looked pointedly up at Coraline. "_Oh_. I beg your pardon, Ms Jones. I didn't see you there."

"Mr Skirving," returned Coraline, smiling a cold smile that didn't reach her eyes. "How nice to see you. I'd considered asking for the air conditioning to be turned up, but you being nearby saved me the effort."

Once upon a time, fifteen years ago, reports from the Merch Mart in Chicago had reached the ears of the then-President, who had gone over them with a fine-toothed comb, considered them carefully, and then arranged for these reports to be passed down to his successors.

Eleven years passed. Presidents came and went, the world turned, and Coraline, Wybie and Maria went through high school and then college together. And in their spare time, they learned what they could about beldams. What they could learn was piecemeal and unreliable, and what they could do was painfully limited.

But on the day that they finished college, they were contacted by then-President Durand, who had one hell of an offer for them.

Arrangements were made. Offices were allocated. Roles were assigned. And their work began as an Executive Order created the new Department of the Supernatural. Durand ended his second term laughing as the country boggled at what had to be a final act of lunacy.

Needless to say, it hadn't been plain sailing for the Department. From day one, they were furiously debated in Congress, scrutinised by conspiracy theorists, mocked by those who saw them as jokes, and attacked by those who saw them as a downright embarrassment. One of the latter was Malcom Skirving, who had built an early career on cutting government waste and diverting resources to where they were needed, and who saw the Department as an insult.

"I'm surprised you could show up," continued Skirving, his grey eyes calculating and cold. "Surely the Department of the Supernatural has no end of important duties to fill its time. Aren't there still bogeymen to be chased out of wardrobes, snipes to be hunted, affairs of that sort?"

"I'm here on duty," replied Coraline. "I was reliably informed that some ancient, vicious monster was haunting the White House, and my goodness, as _if by magic_-"

With enemies like Skirving, all that had so far saved the Department was reluctance on the past of President Kuciyela or Congress to be seen doing anything with it. Even that wouldn't have been enough if they hadn't found unexpected allies in other small federal departments, new and old alike. In the past, federal departments had been reduced, divided, remade or combined, but they had never been disbanded altogether. Many of them feared the precedent that disbanding a Department altogether could set, and so, bizarrely, reluctantly, they made sure the Department of the Supernatural stayed, to Skirving's aggravation.

This hadn't saved the Department saved from having its budget slashed down to bare-bones, of course. At cabinet meetings, they were ignored. Coraline's place in the order of succession was barely above the White House pastry chef. But they had endured, for what that was worth.

Skirving smiled. It was a humourless, taut expression from which a corpse would have run screaming.

"Stake it while you can," he said. "I expect your duties shan't burden you much longer."

"Oh?" They were both walking the last length of corridor to the Cabinet Room. "What makes you think that?"

"Your Department hangs by a thread," said Skirving. The look that he sent Coraline could have frozen water in a glass. "And if you'd had _any_ respect for your nation, you would have cut it yourself long ago."

"Heard this," said Coraline, aware that it wasn't wise to antagonise him further but unable to care. "Heard this. Heard the 'duty to your country' version, 'government laughing stock', and all the speeches you've made to cameras regarding federal waste. You really need a new tune."

Skirving's response was an all-but-imperceptible curve in one eyebrow, and they entered the Cabinet Room in silence. Most of the Cabinet was there already, sat around the long table at the centre, Coraline saw. Cheung and Silverman and Fedecker, for Agriculture and State and Labor respectively. Theresa Bardeaux, the old Secretary of Justice, nodded at Coraline as she entered. Most of the others didn't acknowledge her, instead firing the odd question at Skirving. The table was thick with spread paper and cups of coffee.

She took her position at one of the table's far ends, in a chair on which was set the seal of her department. Gregor Solokov, the young Secretary of Education, glanced at her as she sat to his right, then turned back to his work.

Coraline sat back in her chair. She loathed these meetings, where her input was neither asked for nor taken, and where she was doomed to sit needlessly for long stretches of her mortality.

God's sake, she could be doing something, _anything_, other than wasting her time here. She was often tempted to find out what would happen if she simply failed to turn up for a meeting where she wasn't a designated survivor. But she knew that would just make needless trouble for her department, and so she did her best to endure.

"Pardon me, is this my seat?"

The voice came from her right, and she turned to see who said it.

She recognised the speaker hovering over the chair to her right; the new Secretary of Homeland Security, James Malinois. He was a well-built and strong-featured man, with dark blond hair, honey-brown eyes, and a look of mingled curiosity and confusion on his face.

"Chances are that if it's got your Department's seal on it, it's yours," she said dryly. "I assume this is your first Cabinet meeting?" She knew it would be. From what she'd read in the news, Malinois had only been invested last week, rising from the ranks of the CIA. He'd enjoyed good bipartisan support, and had passed through Congress's subcommittees with little fuss.

"A fair assumption. I haven't had time to pick up the protocol," he said apologetically, extending a hand. "I'm sorry, I don't think we've met. I'm James Malinois, the new Secretary for Homeland Security. You're the Secretary of the Supernatural, am I correct?"

"Correct." She shook the hand.

Malinois grinned. "There's quite a few stories about your..."

The door opened, and Coraline turned and saw the President flanked by the Secret Service. Everyone rose while he stood.

President Kuciyela was slender and slightly built, for the power he wielded. He had dark, ochre-brown skin, and grey-streaked dark hair kept in a careful mane. His eyes, framed behind flat-lined spectacles, were so dark they were almost black, and his high cheekbones seemed to come to cutting edges. Three years of the presidency had made his face careworn, crow's feet spreading at corners.

"Seat yourselves," he said, his voice measured and calm. Everyone did so.

"Who's our designated survivor?" asked Bardeaux, glancing around the table.

"Vice-President Holloway," said Kuciyela. "He's on a goodwill visit to Canada."

_Good luck to the Canadians_, thought Coraline. Holloway had acquired many names during his three years as the Vice-President, few of which were in high awe of his intellect. Some of the older Republicans in Congress had taken to calling him 'Quayle Rides Again'.

Folders unfolded, and discussions unwound, and the Cabinet started to debate as Coraline sat back in her chair.

Two hours of stupefying boredom droned past like a taster of Hell. She only caught the odd snippet of conversation; Silverman advising that aid be given to the Reunified Korean State, Skirving's warnings regarding the intractability of Congress, and Malinois's reports on new, vague threats to homeland security.

Coraline sat in silence. Broaching the topic of beldams at the Cabinet Table was the sort of mistake you learned quickly not to make.

Eventually the meeting adjourned. Malinois left first, casting a backwards glance over his head into the room as he left, followed closely by the others.

Coraline approached Kuciyela once nearly all the others had left, and only Skirivng and a few security staff remained in the room. The President looked up as she approached.

"What is it, Ms Jones?" he asked, his even expression betraying only a little weariness.

Coraline couldn't help but think of a political cartoon she had seen about a year back, that played up Kuciyela's image as constantly careworn. It showed him trudging through a field, with the apparatus of government and current issues depicted as various burdens weighed upon him. Vice-President Holloway was an anvil with an expression of genial idiocy chained to Kuciyela's right foot. Skirving was a cadaverous vulture digging its claws into his shoulder and screeching into his ear. And, amongst dozens of similar details, the Department of the Supernatural was a small child who was tugging on Kuciyela's hand while gabbling about its imaginary friend and the monsters under its bed.

"A matter's arisen in the Department of the Supernatural that I think you have to know about, Mr President," said Coraline, opening and reaching into her bag.

"Presidents typically have busy schedules, Ms Jones, I don't know if you're aware," said Skirving. "Whatever you want to say can wai..."

"Peace, Malcolm," said Kuciyela. "What do you want to show me, Ms Jones?"

Coraline drew out the spy and held it out on her palm. Kuciyela squinted at it.

"What's that in your hand?"

"It's an electronic spy," said Coraline, making Kuciyela and Skirving look sharply up. "It was discovered in a vital area of the Thaddeus complex late last night. According to someone who knows about these things, it's a government model. As you can imagine, this begs the question of _what_ exactly it was doing there."

"Is that thing deactivated?" asked Skirving sharply.

"Thoroughly." Coraline gave the Chief of Staff a withering look. "I'm not so stupid as to bring an active spying device into cabinet meetings, whatever your opinion of me."

"Have the intelligence agencies reported any of their hardware going astray?" asked Kuciyela of Skirving.

"I don't know. I'll find out." Skirving's lips thinned as he spoke, and his eyes narrowed on the spy. "If they have, then it's possible other government offices may be compromised."

"I agree. A full search of government offices may be necessary." Kuciyela turned to Coraline. "Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Ms Jones. If it turns out other departments have been infiltrated as well, then rest assured, an investigation will be carried out at the very highest levels. You have my word."

Coraline heard the words, and what was written between the lines.

_If it's more than one department, this represents a serious breach of federal security. If it's just your own, however, then there are more worthwhile things to get worried about._

Still, what more could she have expected?

"Thank you, Mr President," said Coraline, impatient to just leave and get back to the Department. Where she could actually _do her job_.

She turned on her heel and left the room, leaving the spy and the two men behind her.

She hoped to Christ that Maria had something for her to kill by the time she got back.


	4. Undertaking

Maria didn't disappoint. By the time Coraline got back, Maria had managed to chase down the last details on the location of another beldam in Delaware, in the west side of Newark.

"You do not want to know what I went through to get this information," said Maria as she handed Coraline multiple printouts.

"Did it involve cursing?" Coraline thumbed through the papers.

"I came pretty close."

"Did it involve gnashing of teeth?"

"More than you can imagine."

"And is that a dent in the monitor?"

"Would you believe me if I said no?"

"Heh." Coraline looked at one sheet. "You're guessing this one's about half a century old?"

"About that. So she'll have at least one soul, maybe two, that you'll have to free." Maria looked straight at Coraline. "When will you be heading up?"

"I was thinking now, while it's still early. I've already got my shotgun on standby, and there's only a few other things I need to take. I can cut through Maryland, get there, and stay in a motel for the night. You'll definitely see me back tomorrow."

"Cool. Don't die."

"Why break a habit? Oh, that reminds me. Did you get round to resewing the...?"

Maria sighed and, with some effort, pulled up Coraline's trench coat. Thin lines of stitching ran along where the beldam from the day before had slashed it open.

"I don't see why you can't resew your own stuff," she said, handing the heavy garment over with both hands.

"Because when I try stitching, it looks like a catatonic spider with needles for legs wandered onto the coat. Wybie's even worse. Whereas you're so, _so_ good at precise, delicate stuff like ..."

"Is that meant to be obnoxious flattery?"

"Yes."

Maria smiled. "I gave the chainmail that showed a scrub as well. Getting it rusty would be a pretty bad idea, I think."

"I'd imagine so."

If your trade was fighting the supernatural, and you intended to live to do so regularly, you required certain tools of the trade.

Such as a shotgun, loaded with custom-made, iron-coated slugs. Reflexes like a snake on a hot pan. Information on the enemy you were going to fight. And, of course, a long coat interlined with iron rings of chainmail.

"I'm on a roll at the moment, actually," said Maria. "You know New York?"

"Never heard of it. Is it a college town, or...?"

"You're a loss to comedians everywhere. Anyway, I'm getting evidence of another beldam there, working in partnership with something else. A horla."

Coraline paused, caught mid-buttoning her coat up. "A despair-eater? That..._that_ should be interesting. We've only encountered them a couple of times before. Both times, it wasn't for long."

"You know our policy. If it's a creature we've never encountered before, or if there's more than one, then it's a full department outing."

"Right. How's your fire discipline?"

"It...um..." Maria waved a hand uncertainly. "It might exist?"

"Then once you're done here, get to a shooting gallery and brush up. I know it's been a while since the last department outing, but..."

"I know, I know."

"Take Wybie with you." Coraline finished the top buttons, and picked up her backpack and the case with her shotgun. "Tell him I'll be back tomorrow, and that if he sets anything else on fire, I'll tear out his heart with his _own_ detached hands."

"I'll quote that in full."

"You do that. See you tomorrow, Maria." Coraline opened the front door and left, Maria watching her go. She only stopped to put her case and bag in the boot of the Department's elderly electric van before she got in the driver's door and started the motor, setting the sound system to a gentle hum. The van peeled out onto the road snaking through the streets to the main highway, soon lost to sight by the rising towers of the city.

Maria closed the door and returned to her desk. She settled into her chair, nudged the computer awake, and opened the window containing an index of databases.

Her eyes set in concentration, and she got back to her work.

She pulled up fields of data from districts in New York, comparing rates of cases of missing people and children to one another. She removed cases which had been resolved, retaining those which were unresolved or which were still disputed. She narrowed in on the highest numbers of those, and carried out cross-searches. She combed through lists of buildings, for those which were old or culturally or emotionally significant, and checked them against the different districts' cases of missing people.

She worked quickly, her hand tapping across the keyboard and the pointer on screen blurring from field to column. Her mind could sift quickly through the information, and could quickly notice incongruities or broken patterns.

She then found a likely candidate, and her mouth pulled taut at the edges with satisfaction.

And then, based on her earlier hunch, she pulled up similar lists of suicides.

Her job wasn't especially glamorous or exciting, but she took quiet satisfaction in it regardless.

It was all very well to have a trouble-shooter, but only if you knew where trouble _was_.

* * *

><p>From the back of the building, another person was also hard at work.<p>

Well, technically, two people. And a cat.

"Do you see how close my two fingers are together, Sayid?" said Wybie, his hand outheld and his index finger and thumb nearly touching at the tips. "_That_ is how close I am to a breakthrough. I _will_ have a functioning Eroder before the month is out. Before this _day_ is out."

"Of course you will," said Sayid diplomatically.

"Seriously, I have a good feeling about this try. I saw where I went wrong with No. Seventeen and I fixed it. And I've given this one two dry runs and it hasn't gone on fire or fried any electronics or torn a hole through the floor or anything unexpected like that."

"That bodes well."

"Exactly. So give me Tripod."

Sayid unconsciously clutched the cat closer. "Are you _sure_ he's not going to be hurt?" Tripod wriggled and _mwwr_ed, as if to support the query.

"Absolutely sure."

Sayid hesitated, then passed Tripod over. Wybie took him and gently placed him down in the middle of a circle made from the connected cords of the latest prototype of the Reality-Eroder. The cat stood patiently while Wybie bent down beside the cuboid heart of the machine, checking a tiny dial and looking over the Eroder for any last immediately obvious flaws. He then shuffled around so that he knelt just outside the circle.

"Standing well back, Sayid?" he asked. "This time. This time for sure." And with that, he jabbed at a button.

There was a faint buzz, and what felt like the crackle and tug of static electricity in the air within the circle. Tripod looked around in interest, and there came the faint scent of honeysuckle.

Wybie waited for a few seconds, then, when nothing happened, stepped inside the circle and looked down at Tripod.

"Any luck?" he said hopefully.

Tripod met his gaze, and then purred "_Mrrew._"

Wybie said a word which shouldn't be said in front of the young and impressionable.

"So that's a failure, I take it?" said Sayid.

Wybie cupped one hand around his chin and tapped his foot as he looked down at the machine and the cat. He bent down, switched off the machine, and resumed the pose.

"Once she gets back, and the next time Coraline's going out on a hunt, I'm going with her," he decided. "I need to check something in the Sur-real itself. There's something obvious I'm missing here, I'm just not sure _what_."

"Shall I put this away?"

"Leave it. I'll do it. You … do whatever it is interns do. Make coffee. File stuff. Collect my mail."

"You don't send mail to each other. And you don't get mail from anyone else either."

"Less pointing out facts, more fetching my mail. And take Tripod with you."

Sayid smiled and picked up Tripod, who favoured him with a few token claw-slashes. The intern left, closing the door behind.

Wybie looked again at No. Eighteen. Then he drew out a pen from one of the pockets of his labcoat, and a pad of notepaper from another, larger pocket. He knelt down beside it, and kept one eye trained on the machine as he wrote in a spidery scrawl.

_Outcome: Failure. As device showed no faults during initial testing, __a run with a feline subject was carried out, which failed to produce anything intelligible. PROGRESS - _(This was underlined repeatedly)_ – definite Sur-real energies tapped, no explosion, seems to respond best to mineral fragments rather than bio. fragments, as used in past attempts. Greater structural integrity of Eroder a possible reason__? Hypothesis needs evidence before it becomes worthwhile._

_Nineteen: __**possible**__ shortening of cables, so as to produce more breakthrough in a smaller locale. Different and greater quantities of bio tissue. Note to self – check thauma tables, compare specimens. __Iron __contagion__? Contrast?_

He focused on the task ahead of him, another hypothesis lying disproven at his feet. But though this was typical of his work, though it caused him endless frustration, he accepted it as the price of eventually pinning down the answer.

And this was the least of what he did. He had greater, longer-running projects than this. For example, his constant recording and classification of the creatures they encountered in their work.

There were more than beldams in the Sur-real, more than beldams who preyed upon humanity. There were horlas and ragamolls, seelie and unseelie, wendigos and sluaghs and djinni and nuckelavees and things beyond counting which didn't even have names, yet unknown as they were.

But as alien as they were, even _they_ had rules.

Wybie scribbled and thought and already saw the shape of his next attempt in his mind, his scientific mind exploring the possibilities and filling in flaws and applying knowledge already learned.

He was a scientist. He sought to find out the mechanics of the supernatural, to find out how it functioned, and what lived in it, for the sake of knowledge, and for safeguarding those closest to him.

And damned if it wasn't satisfying.

* * *

><p>And later, much later, when the night was at its darkest, Coraline went on the hunt.<p>

The lairs of some Beldams were a subtle corruption of the world just outside them. Some were exact replicas. And others were dark reflections.

In contrast to the poor house in which the door to the beldam's lair lay, this lair was a vaulted palace. Slim pillars rose from a cold marble floor, supporting a roof formed from a million drifting gold-white stars. The high, curved walls gleamed with a grey sheen, as opaque and inchoate as smoke caught in glass.

Echoing emptiness pervaded. Through it, a monster stalked slowly. It had the upper body of a woman, her skin as smooth and white as Arctic ice, in sharp contrast to her dark rosewood button-eyes. Her spiderish body was glass-like and dark, her carapace as fat and dark as a full carafe, her thin legs like glass tubes filled with some pitch liquid.

She had finished feeding a few minutes before. What remained of her meal was slumped against the wall at the far end of the room.

Until there came the sound of cracking stone from one side of the large room.

Startled, she spun, and saw a lattice of cracks appear around the hinges of the little doorway which led to her hunting ground. She tensed, uncertain yet dreading the worst.

One more blow tore the door out of the wall with an explosion of stone dust, and the beldam scuttled back on her dark glass legs as a figure unfolded from the doorway. It was enveloped by some great coat, and a shotgun was in its grasp.

This beldam was older than some, and warier than many, and well-informed. She suddenly had no illusions about what had come for her.

"Stormcrow!" she spat, her voice sharp and rough with fear, and turned and ran, her hands striking against two gleaming statues. "Defend me! Defend your maker! Hold the intruder here!" The statues, adult-sized figures carved from gleaming rock and glass, set with rosewood buttons in place of eyes, stirred at her touch, moving ponderously to life. They sighted for the intruder, and staggered towards them.

The shotgun's retort pealed around the room like a clap of lightning, and the fragments of stone that were once the statue's torso clattered on the floor like hollow thunder. The other statue lurched on, undaunted, and it drew in close enough to take a swipe at the coated intruder.

But the intruder was faster than stone and glass could ever be, and as she pulled away from the swung arm, she seized it with one hand and pulled sharply, using the statue's own momentum to send it crashing downwards. As it cracked against the floor, the intruder kicked its head with all her strength, breaking it off and sending it tumbling across the marble floor in a river of shards and fragments.

Coraline swore, bending momentarily to clutch at and rub her foot, from which a sharp pain was coming. As she did, her eyes glanced around the room.

And sighted the beldam's last meal, tiny against the wall.

She stood up straight, the pain now meaningless. Her hands moved on long-learned reflex, loading another slug into the shotgun, her gaze straight ahead, her eyes like points of fire.

From the corridor down which the beldam had fled, there came another shrieked command of "Hold the intruder! Buy me time!" From the ground in front of the corridor's entrance, there rose two more statues, twisting themselves out of the living marble amidst billowing clouds of stone dust.

"Drag this out all you like," said Coraline, in a voice so full of fury that no room was left for volume or inflection. "It won't do you any good."

She held her shotgun before her and marched, gun blazing through the smoke.


	5. Divulgence

_Rubble was strewn over dark marble, black tarry blood over once-fine furnishings._

_The monster lay slumped against one wall, hissing as she tried to rise, reaching out one claw towards the cold creature of pure ice and fury that stood before her._

"_M…mercy," she managed. The cold creature looked unmoved._

"_Why?" it asked. Its weapon, a gun that spat pure, terrible iron, was levelled._

"_Didn't want … you're here for … souls in cabinet to your left. Please … I had to feed…I wasn't _cruel_…"_

"_There was a kid you left in your front parlour," said the cold creature. "Left them there, like a piece of garbage. What was their name?"_

"_They … they were …"_

"_Earn your mercy." The bloodlust behind the creature's demeanour, like lava constrained by brittle ice, was terrible to behold. "_Earn it!_"_

"_Please!"_

_The shotgun fired once. And then again. And again and again until the trigger clicked empty._

* * *

><p>Friday opened with a spell of wet weather, a stormfront that had gathered momentum across the Midwest and hit the East Coast like a hammer blow, dispelling the few scraps of sunshine that had fluttered around the capital city. Rivers ran through gutters. Roofs sagged with the weight of dripping water. Iron-grey, dark-threaded skies pulsed with thunder.<p>

There was no lightning, however, which disappointed Wybie. If you were advancing science, then you deserved to have bolts of lightning as a backing chorus.

He was sitting in a chair at one of his workstations, with a brick-like binder, stuffed with papers and plastic pockets and printouts, resting across his legs. His brow was furrowed as he pored over tables of recovered Sur-real fragments, and checked them off with a pencil.

"Seelie wings, buttons, wall fragments," he muttered as he scanned the list. "Tried this, tried that, did nothing, was worse than useless, blew a hole through the skylight. Damn it!"

"What was that?" came Sayid's crackling tone from the intercom in the wall.

"It was a swear word, which you shouldn't repeat, being young and impressionable. And why is that thing turned on?"

"Something's broken at the reception end," said Sayid. "I can't turn it off."

Coraline hadn't yet returned from Delaware, and Maria was at some event for her church. It had fallen to the intern to man the front desk. "Have you tried bashing the button really hard?" asked Wybie, drawing upon his wealth of technical knowledge.

"Several times. And I've tried asking it nicely as well."

"Huh. I wondered where that incorporeal pleading for me to work was coming from." Wybie turned back to the folder. "Do what you can, alright? I've got some work to get through."

"Sure thing." The intercom went quiet. Wybie started again, at the top of the list.

It took five minutes for the eager light to leave his eyes. It took ten minutes after that for him to come to hate the chart, and the half-dozen like it he had checked off, to no result.

And at forty minutes and counting, the last dregs of Wybie's will to live had been drained away, and his homicidal thoughts regarding the binder were interrupted by the quiet sounds of conversation from the intercom. He focused on it, trying to make out the familiar sounds of Coraline or Maria's voices.

Instead, what came was a crackling question from Sayid. "I've been asked to ask you if you have any sort of formal system for making appointments."

"I don't know, since no one's ever made one before. Why? Who wants one?" said Wybie, trying to keep the aggravation he was feeling out of his voice. Judging by the delay before Sayid's next, considerably more cautious words, he didn't succeed.

"Er, it's the Secretary of Homeland Security. Or at least, he says he's the Secretary of Homeland Security, and he's got an ID card which agrees with him. Do you want to meet him?"

Wybie stretched in his chair, staring straight up at the rivulets running down the skylight. A visit from a cabinet secretary was the last thing he had expected. Why was he here? What did he want? Wybie knew he should find out.

If nothing else, he wasn't likely to get much else done in his current frame of mind. Perhaps a distraction like this could amend that.

"Fine. Send him through." Wybie then considered the Thaddeus Complex's layout, and the ramifications of a member of the cabinet vanishing under mysterious circumstances. "Actually, no. Lead him here."

Sayid crackled assent, and Wybie leaned back in his chair.

After a few minutes, there was a rap at the door, and Sayid said "Express delivery of one Secretary."

"In you come." The door opened, and Sayid entered, trailing Malinois.

"Mr Malinois," said Wybie, standing up from the chair and extending a hand. "This is … a bit surprising. Why have you dropped in?"

"Likewise, Mr … Lovat, is it?" Malinois looked around the workroom, his eyes wide. "I've heard a lot about your department. I had a half-hour to kill, and I thought I'd invite myself over. I'm not interrupting anything, am I?"

"Nothing important." Wybie craned his head to look at Sayid. "You know how you're such an obedient and dutiful intern, with such a well-developed moral character?"

"Two coffees?" asked Sayid with all due resignation.

"Milk and sugar in mine," said Wybie.

"I'll just take mine plain," said Malinois.

Sayid nodded and left. Malinois looked around at Wybie, noticing his patchwork labcoat, and smiled gently.

"I take it your department doesn't put much stock in formality?"

"When there's only four people in the same building, there's hardly much point in formality." Wybie swept an arm around, indicating the stacked workstations. "Not that it stops hateful amounts of work being done."

"I can tell," said Malinois. Curiosity was still naked on his expression, and for good reason. The workstations were in an even greater state of chaos than usual. Piles of papers and electronics sprouted across them and cascaded from the sides, with small glass jars nestled amidst them like jewels. No. Eighteen was sprackled amidst some of those piles, the cords trailing on the floor, the main body propped atop a bulging binder.

Wybie's own attention was on Malinois. The man was almost a foot shorter than Wybie, with askew hair, bright, curious eyes, and an air of wonder utterly at odds with the sober suit he wore.

"You know, you still haven't really answered my question," said Wybie, almost thoughtfully. "I asked you what drew you here. I don't think you're just here to gawp at the freakshow."

"Oh?" Malinois's smile became slightly mischievous. "I'm originally from the CIA. Gawping at freakshows was what I did for a living."

"Perhaps. But you're still not telling me everything, I think."

"I'm on the level," Malinois assured. "Honestly, I am quite curious about your department. I mean, you know that the Department of the Supernatural's not exactly…"

"Held in high esteem by anyone with a functioning brainstem?" Wybie said sardonically. Malinois paused.

"…I would have put it more diplomatically. But I'll admit that I want to see what all the fuss is about. And I want to see what exactly you've been doing here."

"Secretary, are you really here in good faith?" asked Wybie. "Because I _am_ doing work here, and if all you want is to gawp at the freakshow, then have the courtesy to do it in _your_ time."

"I'm not here to mock. I just want to look at what you're doing with a sceptical eye, and judge what I can based on the evidence."

"A man after my own heart," said Wybie, settling. "Alright, I'll play along. Let's start with what you know about us." He gestured for Malinois to begin.

"Right, okay," said Malinois, tilting his head slightly back in recollection. "Let's see. You were established four years ago by President Durant. You've not been particularly well-regarded, you've not really been touched much by Kuciyela, apart from getting hammered in your budget, and that's pretty much it. Oh, and I imagine you get no end of mail from people wearing tinfoil hats."

"Some nights when I'm bored, I read through some of the best letters," said Wybie. "Bless them. They're so _invested_."

There was a knock from the door, and Sayid entered briefly to deliver two coffees. Malinois took his silently, and Wybie took his and enthusiastically knocked back a gulp of the scalding liquid.

"Right," he said, his mouth and throat only slightly seared, "So you don't know much beyond what's obvious to everyone. I can fix that, if you're ready to listen." Malinois nodded, and Wybie turned to the whiteboards at the back.

"First things first," said Wybie as he walked over and took up a cloth to wipe on of them clean. "I've been working on this with help for about four years. Bit more if you include unofficial observations I did beforehand. But I think I'm only person to made an actual study of all this. This isn't complete. This is _nowhere_ near complete. Half of it is speculation, and the other half could be totally wrong for all I know. But for what it's worth, I don't think any of what I've compiled so far is wrong. At least, it hasn't been proven wrong." Malinois nodded politely, his expression asking Wybie to get on with it. Wybie cleared his throat, and took the top off a pen.

He drew a circle on the whiteboard, and turned to face Malinois and tapped the circle with his pen.

"This here? This is the real world. This is where everything we see happens, where forces interact, people live, atoms do their stuff, everything. This is where you and everyone else does their work. This is real." Moving slightly to the side, he drew another circle overlapping the first, the edges gently zig-zagging. He stepped aside so Malinois could see, and gave it an emphatic tap.

"_This_ is the Sur-real. Apart from reality, but connected to it. An overlapping dimension, with its own creatures, own rules, own order. This is where _we_ do our work."

"The thing about the Sur-real – the thing that's kind of constrained our ability to get info on it – is that there's only certain places where it can get through to the real world. Gateways, doorways, between here and there. Ways from which predators can emerge." Malinois's brows raised at the mention of predators, but he remained silent.

"We've come across hundreds of doorways during our work – literally hundreds – and I've been trying my best to find a common link between them all. The most I can find is that they're all places that have been used by humans for a long time, or that mean something special to people. We've found the best number of them in houses, especially old ones, but we've also found them in museums, churches, hospitals, a couple of old roadside attractions. One time, in a rail station. And before you ask, no, not every building that's old or important has a doorway in it. Why? Give me time, because at the moment I've got _no_ idea."

"I take it that things can cross from these doorways to our world?" asked Malinois.

"Oh, well done. You're skipping ahead. Yes, things can cross over from there to here, and vice versa." Wybie walked over to one of the workstations, and beckoned for Malinois to follow him. Crouching down beside one of the drawers, he tugged it sharply open with a mild explosion of paper. Reaching in, he lugged out a heavy binder, stuffed to the gills with paper. He placed it down on the workstation, and thumbed through it until he came to a specific page, and tilted the binder towards Malinois, who craned his head forward.

The page was titled **Beldam – (**_**Esthia Psychas Arachne**_**) – Desire Eater**. Below that was set a drawing of a creature with the lower body of a spider and the upper body and head of a gaunt woman with buttons in place of eyes, its limbs splayed like the Vitruvian Man. A handwritten description ran beneath the drawing.

_Beldams are denizens of the Sur-real, psychephages who are attuned to strong feelings of desire. Children and adolescents are their preferred targets, although Case File 2021-04 records at least one adult being preyed upon. Among the most common and powerful of psychephages, they are morphologically diverse, and are able to assume different forms that will aid them in snaring a victim. Their true form is a centaur of spider and human female form. More so than other psychephages, they are able to exert will upon and to change areas in the Sur-real. Their token items are buttons, in all cases sewn onto the victim's eyes._

Another note written beneath in a different hand read - _Normal ferroshot __works fine for taking them on. __Be careful about getting into close quarters._

Malinois turned the page, his gaze sceptical but betraying genuine interest. The next entry started **Wendigo – (**_**Esthia Psychas Ferverii)**_** – Rage Eater**, atop a twisted figure knotted with sinewy muscle on a skeletal frame, its face locked in an atavistic snarl amidst banks of protruding teeth. The written description followed the same format as the beldam's, and the little note in a different hand read _Cliff notes version – Vicious, fast bastards who like to _jump.

He turned the page again, and again.

**Seelie – (**_**Esthia Psychas Cyprium**_**) – Love Eater**, above a frail figure done in soft pastel colours, supported by great butterfly-like wings, with eyes like black pits.

**Unseelie – (**_**Esthia Psychas Invidia**_**) – Hate Eater**, above a figure in dark, violent hues, held aloft by scaled wings and watching the reader through eyes like white pinpricks.

On and on he flipped through the pages. There were dozens of creatures, a catalogue of the bizarre and mythological. Each picture was hand-drawn, in a style that looked as though it had been done with a careful hand from memory.

**Nuckelavee – (**_**Esthia P**__**s**__**y**__**chas Arcaibh**_**) – Disgust Eater**. A shrieking, skinless human torso sprouting from the middle of an equally skinless horse, with a single swollen eye set in both heads. **Kimatine – (**_**Esthia Psychas **__**Tadaklan**_**) – Courage Eater**. A muscled hound with a hide the colour of pitch threaded through with silvery strands of lightning, with eyes like two orbs of golden fire. **Coatl**** - ****(**_**Esthia Psychas**__** Quetzal**_** )**** - Ambition Eater**…

Malinois closed the binder gently, and turned to face Wybie.

"These are the things that cross over," said Wybie. "I take it you met Coraline at the cabinet meeting yesterday? She's our trouble shooter. She's the one who goes out with a shotgun and takes these things on where they're hurting people. And Maria, the other member of the department, is the one who finds them."

Malinois looked at the binder again in some wonder. "What … what do you mean when you say they prey on people? That they eat…?"

"_Not_ in a physical sense." Wybie waved his hands briskly and grabbed the binder again, flipping through the pages to the beldam again. "They're psychephages – soul eaters. Or if you don't believe in souls, then they drain minds, eat up your life, whichever. But you end up dead any way.

"Each of these – you see the writing at the top? Each of these is attuned to a different spectrum of the human mind, of human emotion and thought. And they use these emotions as a conduit to the soul or what have you. So if I was in the same building as a wendigo and suddenly felt a great deal of anger towards someone or something, it could use that anger as a way of taking a bite out of my soul. I actually got a bite taken out of my soul by a beldam once."

"So…How did that damage you? Did it damage you?"

"It made it a little hard to think straight for a few days after, but it wasn't permanent. Just do things that are good for the soul. Read a good book, admire a nice view, laugh with friends – it'll heal. Souls are pretty robust things." He tapped the bottom of the paragraph on the page with his pen. "The real danger is if they manage to get a token item on you. If one of those is on you – like buttons on your eyes, for beldams – then that gives the psychephage a constant line to your soul. It can just suck you dry."

"Jesus Christ." Malinois studied the page in silence. Then, "And your department fights these things? On a regular basis?"

"Me and Maria pitch in for some of the tougher creatures or if it's a creature we haven't discovered before. Otherwise, Coraline does most of the actual fighting. She's got the most experience. But it's not too difficult if you know what you're doing, and if you bring iron with you."

"Iron?"

"Oh yeah. Some of the old folklore makes me think a lot of it was based on these creatures. And one thing the old storytellers got right was a weakness to iron. I don't know why – maybe iron's a more inherently real substance, maybe it's just their equivalent of arsenic. I don't know nearly enough about this yet. But there's no reason I should stop trying to know."

Malinois looked at the binder, and around at the room again.

"What do you think?" asked Wybie. "Freakshow or not?"

"I…" Malinois shook his head. "I really don't know. I think the most likely explanations are that you're skilled charlatans or harmlessly insane, but…What concrete evidence do you actually have for all this?"

"Stupidly little," said Wybie resignedly. "Technology fouls around the Sur-real. I've tried taking cameras and the like in when we go on expeditions, but most of them short out, and those that survive just produce blurs. And I've taken back samples, but there's not actually anything that makes them different from normal rock or membrane or wood or whatever. If it's something tangible you want, then you'll have to wait until I've gotten the Eroder working."

"The what?"

"The thing just to your left there. I'm trying to create something that can break the boundary between the real and Sur-real. If I can get it to work, and actually produce a live beldam or horla, then I think that'll give us legitimacy. Even Skirving couldn't argue with a real beldam." Wybie considered the situation. "Well, he probably would, but he wouldn't get very far."

"I'll attest to that." Malinois drained the last of his cup. "Thank you for the coffee and the talk, Mr Lovat. Business calls, I'm afraid. But I'd be happy to talk later, time permitting."

"No trouble," said Wybie, still half-way through his own cup. "It's nice to have a conversation about this that doesn't result in being called a lunatic."

Malinois left, and as he did, Wybie turned back to the Eroder. He regarded it, and tapped it with a pencil, and waited for inspiration to strike.

It didn't.

"Oh, for..."


	6. Confidant

The front door opened, admitting Maria and a short gust of rain before it was closed again.

Maria shook off her umbrella and unfastened her dripping coat, looking at her desk to see Sayid sitting there, his head bent over his dissertation.

"I used to wonder what friendship could be," he crooned as his pencil blurred over the paper, ruthlessly scoring through sentences and scribbling notes in the margin. "Till you all shared its magic with…" He suddenly looked up and coughed, surprised and slightly embarrassed. "Hey, Ms Ortega."

"Sayid," said Maria, hanging up her coat. "Have I ever mentioned how you're a paragon among interns, of such impeccable moral character and all-round…"

"I'm not saying I don't like it when I'm flattered," said Sayid, getting up. "It's just that you invariably expect stuff in exchange for the flattery."

"Milk, no sugar."

Sayid muttered as he walked off to the kettle on the other side of the building. Maria settled herself down, gently pushing aside Sayid's papers (noticing a spelling error as she did, and noting it with a pencil) and booting up her computer, which complied with a recalcitrant gurgle.

She logged in, and once again brought up the tables on New York, resuming from where she had left off the day before.

She had narrowed down her list of likely structures considerably by the time Sayid returned with a cup of coffee, steam wafting off in curlicues from its surface.

"We had the Secretary of Homeland Security over here earlier," he said casually, placing the cup down beside her. She paused with her hands over the keyboard, surprised by the information.

"The new one? Did he say why?"

"Just to have a look round," buzzed the intercom, Wybie's tones distorted by the wires. Maria jumped.

"Is that thing broken again? I thought you fixed it the last time."

"'Fixed' is such a relative term. Blame the intern."

"Why? What did the intern do?" asked Sayid, gathering up paper.

"Something morally reprehensible, no doubt, that resulted in a damaged intercom. Don't do it again," Wybie cheerfully answered.

"How did you get by before you started abusing power?"

"It's like a drug," Wybie confessed. "When's Coraline due back, by the way? Did she tell you yesterday?"

"All she said was sometime today," said Maria. "She'll come back. Don't worry."

"But I'm so _good_ at it."

"Regardless," said Maria, turning back to her computer and absently crossing off the plot on Hester Street.

She got on with her work in silence, while Sayid transferred himself to another room and the assorted clanks and scratches and muffled thuds of Wybie at work came from the intercom.

It was a full half-hour before the door opened again, letting in a little more rain and wind and another wet figure.

"Coraline?" said Maria, looking up. "Good to see you're intact. How did it…" She saw Coraline's face, and stopped talking.

"Hey, Maria," said Coraline, dumping her bags and trenchcoat (which bore one rent in the fabric running across the stomach, and two more on the right shoulder, Maria noted). Her expression was carefully blank, her voice was hollow. "It could have gone better. I'll be back to put these away in a minute, okay? I've got something I need to do."

With that, she walked briskly off through a door to Maria's right, vanishing through it. Footsteps sounded up stairs.

Maria looked after, recognising the scenario and realising the implications. She leaned in close to the intercom, which had fallen silent.

"She's back," she said quietly. "Go to her."

* * *

><p>It was a brief minute later.<p>

Wybie stood outside a door on the first floor of the Thaddeus Complex, trying to gather his nerve to knock.

From inside, there came a sniff, as if the person inside was trying to hide it, even when they were on their own.

"Coraline?" asked Wybie, and knocked.

It was a hard job they did, he knew, and for many different reasons.

They had no prior knowledge, save what they could pick up as they went. They had virtually no support save each other, they had few resources, and they accepted that death was a likely consequence of some of the missions they embarked upon, when they faced what they faced.

Like any difficult job, failure was always a strong possibility. But when they failed, it wasn't necessarily them who paid the price.

Nobody knew that more than Coraline.

When they were lucky, and when they worked as fast as they could, they could get to a psychephage before it could begin to ensnare a victim or before it could drain a person's soul. Over the years, there had been many occasions where Coraline or the department as a whole had charged in at the last moment, and averted tragedy.

But there were occasions where as fast as they could simply hadn't been fast enough, and the evidence was still recognisable.

There was no response to his knock, and Wybie gently pushed the door open.

The room it opened onto was a long, wide room, with mystifyingly empty boxes stacked to the ceiling. On bright days, light would enter from long windows along the wall. The light today was muted, at best. Coraline was crouched between two towering stacks leaned against a wall, one arm wrapped around her knees, the other rubbing her face. Her shoulders shook, and wet tracks ran down what showed off her face.

The instant Wybie entered, she looked up abruptly, and furiously scrubbed harder at her eyes.

"No, for god's sake, don't look at…" she snapped, her voice broken and low. "Not _you_."

Wybei didn't say anything. He'd seen this before, but he still didn't know what he could say. He merely knelt down beside her and gently took the hand that was around her knees.

They held their positions for a few quiet moments, the dull light casting upon them, the wind and patter of rain outside the only noises permitted.

"What happened?" asked Wybie, in his gentlest voice.

It took Coraline a few minutes to answer. "I got there. I got there too late. Just a few minutes." She took a shuddering breath. "_Too. Goddamn. Late._"

Wybie took her hand a little more firmly, a little more reassuringly, lost for a response that wouldn't have worsened the situation. "You couldn't have known," he ventured. "We did everything, _everything_, we could to check out what was going on there. We couldn't have known that the kid had been taken that recently."

"No," she snapped, bitter and sharp. "We just couldn't. I couldn't have gotten there a little faster, you couldn't have done a little more research, Maria couldn't have done a little more fact-finding. We couldn't have done a single thing. Just write it off. Lost cause from the beginning."

Wybie briefly considered trying to dispute the cynicism in that retort, but every particle of common sense in his skull dog-piled atop the notion in an instant.

"Do you think the notion even _occurs_ to Skirving and his goddamn lapdogs?" snarled Coraline. "That when he damn well takes away what little we've got, _this sort of shit happens_. We could have gotten there in time, and I _should've_."

Wybie opened his mouth, and then closed it. Venting anger could help her. Maybe it could help her. He was frustrated by his helplessness in this situation, yet he always found himself in it.

Another minute of silence passed before Coraline said "I didn't get round to writing a report. I got the souls out. I killed the beldam there." Her jaw tightened around the last sentence. "I didn't feel a thing when I killed it. It begged me for mercy, and I didn't feel a thing, and it bothers me that I didn't feel a thing. It drained a kid's soul, but you have to feel _something_ for whatever's begging for _mercy_. I don't know what's happening to me, and I don't…"

Wybie, lost for all other options, could only put one arm around her and hold her close. After a second, she returned the gesture.

Rain glanced off the window, leaving shining rivulets which were forced roughly along new channels by buffeting wind.

After a long minute, Coraline pulled away slowly. "I'll be okay," she said, pulling herself up. "I'll be okay. Thank you."

"Hey," said Wybie, awkwardly patting her shoulder. "What else are psycho-nerds for?"

"Stopping draughts? Firewood?" They both laughed, and walked towards the door.

Wybie spared a thought for when they had gone to the same high school and college. They had been always friends, and for a few brief times, a little more than friends. But whatever they had tried to make last had never managed to, and other things had always somehow conspired to get in the way.

Whatever they were now, they were here for each other, each ready to try and support the other when they needed it the most. Darkest hours were never at their darkest when someone stood by with a light.

"Any update from Maria?" asked Coraline, breaking Wybie out of his thoughts and trying to push the conversation on.

"Not that I know of. Um, we got a visit from the Secretary of Homeland Security when you were gone. Malinois?"

"I met him at the cabinet meeting." Coraline thought about it, and then dismissed the subject. "Skirving probably asked him to go over and dig up dirt. Did he find any?"

"Well, I ended up having a good, long conversation with him…"

"Be still, my beating heart."

"Cynic. And I think I made some progress on the Eroder…"

"What went on fire this time?"

"I'm not talking to you anymore."

"Is that a promise?" They alighted from the stairs, and Coraline pushed open the door to Maria's office. Maria looked up from her desk, her expression expectant and pensive, at Wybie and at Coraline.

"Are you…?"

"I'm okay," said Coraline, with a forced smile. "But you know what makes me even okayer? Kicking the crap out of psychephages."

"Step right up. I've got just what the doctor ordered."

"Hit me."

"Tomorrow, how does a brief trip to Brooklyn sound?"

"Sounds _excellent._"


	7. Snippets

_Office 13A, The Thaddeus Complex, 14:32_

A table, on which several printouts of compiled information are spread, nestling next to coffee cups and a sleeping cat on the hard lacquered surface.

On one side, a slim, dark-complexioned woman who shifts through the papers, and picks up those that she reads aloud from. On another, a shorter woman with cobalt-blue hair and eyes as sharp as the scars along one cheek, scrutinising the papers. And on the other, a tall man with dark skin, wild hair, and a labcoat seemingly made by the application of a sewing machine to a junkyard tickles the recumbent cat under the chin, which does its best to ignore the attention.

"A beldam and a horla," said Coraline thoughtfully. "I don't think we've ever fought those as a pair before."

"It isn't a usual combination, certainly," said Maria absently, her eyes on the papers. "What do they get from it?"

"It actually makes a pretty horrible kind of sense, when you think about it," said Wybie. When Coraline and Maria ventured glances in his direction, he explained. "Psychephages cooperate when their hunting can complement each other, right? Beldams feed on desire, and most often on children. Horlas feed on anything that feels despair. What do missing children leave behind them?"

"Parents," answered Coraline. Her jaw tightened. "Where, and for how long?"

"Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, an apartment building on a main street." Maria turned pages. "For at least forty years. Management for the building's shifted a few times more than average as well. Conservative guess, around four victims, adults and children combined."

"Bay Ridge. That's not so far from where we took out that phylax in the old Methodist church, remember?"

"Pretty hard to forget," said Wybie. "You figured out you could only get to its lair via a point on the roof."

"That's right," said Coraline. "So you stayed at ground level to deal with anyone who wanted to ask why two people were clambering up a ladder onto the roof. We had to get to the steeple, so we had to climb up some piping after we used the ladder…"

"…Which was the exact moment when the pigeons nesting in the steeple took umbrage to our presence," said Maria dryly.

"Best. Mission. Ever," said Wybie. "It's pretty hard to ward off people when you're too busy pissing yourself laughing, though."

"You're so considerate in times of need, I've always thought," said Coraline.

"Hey, you drew quite a crowd. They all thought it was some kind of theatre."

"Let's get back to the interesting things Maria's saying, shall we?"

"Please do," said Maria, looking back down at her paper. "We've learned not to assume a typical lair layout for paired psychephages. But we can expect at least some blend of beldam features and horla characteristics. What info have we got on horlas, Mr Scientist?"

"Horlas? Honestly, not that much." Wybie waved a hand in a vague manner. "As raw power goes, they're only a little below beldams. Human-sized, have some limited Sur-real shaping ability, and I think they're capable of exerting mental influence on people in their territory. But they're still like any other psychephages. Iron isn't their friend. Introduce it to them at length."

"Just so I can broach the subject while we're still tangentially on it, how much ferroshot do you two have?" asked Coraline. "If we do this tomorrow, then that'll give me time to make some new rounds. Wybie, you're on .45, aren't you? And I know you're a .40, Maria."

"I could use a top-up," admitted Maria. "I'll check if there's anything else I can scrounge up, but I wouldn't hold your breath."

"You know what you have to do," said Coraline. "We'll make an early start tomorrow."

* * *

><p><em>Storage 4, The Thaddeus Complex, 19:02<em>

For Wybie, the world around his lab was in a state of rhythm.

From above, there came a constant, muffled litany of whirring and muttered blasphemy as Coraline worked over the bullet press on the first floor, turning out new iron rounds for his and Maria's pistols, absolutely focused on the work.

From behind him, on the same, there came a dull _thud-thud-thud_, broken up by stretches of silence, the sound of Maria getting in some practise shooting with fake rounds.

But inside his lab, there was no sound whatsoever. He thought furiously in silence, his pen hovering over his notepad. Tripod regarded him with flat eyes, perched atop one of the halves of No. Eleven.

"What am I missing?" Wybie demanded of no-one in particular. "There's got to be something stupidly obvious I'm missing in breaking down the barriers between here and the Sur-real. What is it? Any ideas?" he demanded of Tripod, who favoured him with a level look, an arched back, and a hacked-up hairball.

"That _isn't_ a constructive contribution."

* * *

><p><em>Office 20B, The Thaddeus Complex, 20:41<em>

"Hey, Mom. Sorry I haven't called earlier. It's just, you know, work. Government takes the hours of your mortality and throws them in a shredder for chuckles."

Coraline stood by the press, one hand resting gently on it while fresh iron bullets enclosed in plastic sabots cooled, her other hand holding a cell phone to her left ear, from which a low, staticky murmur came.

"Well, _I_ don't know. Maybe the Chief of Staff needs the mortality of mortals to sustain his dark existence. I wouldn't put it past him."

"What do you mean, 'uncharitable'? I'm the very soul of charity. Was that a sardonic laugh? Have I ever lied to you?"

"That doesn't _count_. I was fourteen at the time, and I was bored. You're allowed to lie when you're fourteen and bored, and you got the car repaired eventually. It wasn't a total write-off."

"How's Dad? Is his recovery still … oh, that's great. Modern medicine for you, Mom. Did he get my card?"

"Knew it would have him in stitches. Well, _more_ stitches. Oh, come on. He would have made that joke as well. He'd be ashamed if I didn't make that joke."

"Work's still nothing special. File papers, look bored at meetings, fritter money away, the usual."

"Wybie? Why would … come on, Mom. We've been friends for too long to try messing with it now. I mean, we're technically work colleagues as well, so we probably couldn't even if we wanted. And I'd rather not … we're just friends. Really."

"Stop laughing in a knowing way. I _hate_ when you do that."

"Look, we'll make a deal. You stop laughing in a knowing way, and I'll do my best to get into a steady relationship before you turn sixty. Deal?"

"Untrustworthy? Me, your loving daughter? Why would … for crying out, am I ever going to live down the car? I was _fourteen_."

"I'll be on a trip for the next day or two, just so you know. I might not be able to get in touch with you at all times. But I will phone you back first chance I get, alright? Give dad my love."

"Love you too, Mom."

* * *

><p><em>Just outside the Thaddeus Complex, 06:56<em>

"What's the holdup?" demanded Coraline, leaning against the department's van. "I want to get an early start."

"But Your Dread Sovereigncy, some of us weren't _conscious_ an hour ago." Wybie held a suitcase under one arm, and his left hip under his coat bulged with the mass of a holster. He had just come at a brisk run from his apartment, and stepped reluctantly through the dry, dark dawn, through which fingers of cold stabbed.

"Invest in coffee. We're operating on 'saving someone's ass' time. You've got to be up-and-at-em. Let's see some go-getting attitude."

"Bleeaargh."

"Or some zombie-on-depressants attitude. That works too, I guess." Coraline turned to face the next figure emerging from the complex. "Everything sorted?"

"That's everything." Maria also held a satchel, and had a holster under her coat. "Locked up, logged off, ready to kick fundament."

"Awesome."

"There's just a thing … I was looking at my inbox. I'm not sure, but I think there's something strange going on with the other cabinets. Do you think it's …"

"If it's serious, we can deal with it after we come back. Let's just focus on the job." Coraline waved her past, and looked at the last figure in the doorway, who looked even more sleep-deprived than Wybie.

"Sayid, you're henceforth promoted to Acting-Everything-in-the-Department. Hold the fort, deal with any calls in your usual manner, and don't talk to any strange men. Clear?"

"Crystal. Is this perchance going to be one of those promotions that doesn't get me paid anything extra and which you take away as soon as you return?"

"Hey, you're _learning_."

"I call driver's seat," called Wybie from the van.

"Ha. You made a funny joke."

* * *

><p><em>Somewhere between Washington DC and New York, 09:01<em>

"You know what's always bugged me about our van?" said Wybie from the back. "The music player won't work for love nor money. I mean, we can make planes that can cross the Atlantic in an hour, and we can make zeppelins that go forever on a single gallon, but we can't make a functioning entertainment system. What gives?"

"It goes for sixty hours on a full battery, and you're complaining about the music facilities?" said Coraline distractedly, her hands on the wheel, her eyes on the rushing landscape. Power sections of steel and wire on either side yielded intermittently to rolling green fields, wet with dew, fat with life. Mist shrouded the highway.

"Well … yes. Yes, I am. I'm that cozened."

"You could just bring your own player," pointed out Maria from the shotgun seat.

"I've never gotten round to getting one." Wybie thought, and then his eyes narrowed with triumphant realisation. "Hey, Maria?"

"What's that look? That isn't a good look."

"You know how you went to choir in high school?"

Stony silence. Then, "This isn't something I'm suffering alone, you realise that?"

"Why do I have the feeling that the most blissful period of my life has come crashing to a stop before I had time to properly appreciate it?" said Coraline.

* * *

><p><em>A little closer to New York, 09:17<em>

"…_Where troubles melt like lemon drops, away above the chimney tops. That's wheeeere yooouuu'll fiiiind me…_" sang forth from the van, in two different voices, one clear and mezzo-soprano, the other untrained and approximately baritone. "_Somewhere, over the raaainbow…_"

"Oh my _god_, I am _this_ close to killing us all. _This_ close."

"This is fun," said Wybie, breaking off from the song. "We can make her emphasis everything."

"_Hate you all._"

* * *

><p><em>New York, 11:00<em>

By the time Wybie and Maria had moved onto the assorted songs of _The Sound of Music_, and Coraline had threatened them with at least several dozen forms of death in escalating order of horribleness, New York had risen from the land like an awakening giant, a massive conglomeration of life and concrete and metal.

The city remained the largest in the country, and it pulsed with people. Energy and drive and vibrancy poured through the streets, and made the place unique. Beneath a rough and chaotic exterior was a deep and heartfelt humanity of all stripes and shades, where people shouted across the street to give directions and help the lost, where people walked casually down the street in costumes beyond the bizarre, where five minutes walking could take you between slick upper-crust department stores, street performers, city parks, and sky-stabbing office blocks of glass and high-grade steel.

Such a city attracted attention from psychephages like predators to a watering hole. The department had made seven journeys here alone so far in the last three months.

Past the human tumult, toothed shadows lay in wait, ready to ambush.

Midday rose over the city, over the rivers of traffic, over the battered van belonging to the department.

"Brooklyn, Brooklyn," muttered Coraline. "Some big signs saying 'Brooklyn thisaway, morons' would come in handy. What does this place's planning department do with its time? Have rubber band fights?"

"Left down this upcoming junction, then keep going until you see the lights for the big casino. Then you take a right just after it and you can't miss the signs," said Maria quickly.

"I knew that. Just testing you."

* * *

><p><em>Suntouched Apartments, Bay Ridge, 11:32<em>

Maria didn't do social situations with people she didn't know very well. Wybie was too much for one conversation. So it fell to Coraline to do introductions.

She opened the door to the ground floor of the apartment building, the other two trailing behind her. She recognised the type of place as soon as she walked in. The ceilings were low, and the furniture and furnishings were worn with age. There were scratches in wood panelling, a few permanent grooves in the walls, and the whole place looked as though it had seen better days. But the carpet on the floor, thin as it was, was clean and dust-free. No cobwebs lurked in corners, and any surfaces had been cleaned.

It was a run-down place, but not because of a lack of effort from the people who ran it.

She saw the place's manager alone behind the reception desk; a middle-aged, care-worn man whose dark hair, speckled with strands of white, receded over a weathered scalp. Lines had grooved themselves into his face, markers of care and stress. And there was a torn, hollow look behind his eyes as well, one she had seen too many times to count, a look accented by the odd clutch at the cross hung around his neck.

And if Coraline had to hazard a guess, she'd say that most of that care came from a recent and near-at-hand source.

"Mr Elachi?" said Coraline. The man looked up, and the worry in his eyes transmuted on the spot to blank astonishment.

"Yes?" he said. "To whom am I speaking?"

"My name is Coraline Jones." She presented her ID card. "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."


	8. Pandaemonium

Truly desperate men were easy to convince of anything, even the truth. Mr Elachi, once he had been told who the trio were and what they were after, practically fell over himself to give them what they needed.

"Did the police get in touch with you?" he asked nervously, as he led them through the ground floor. "I reported her missing only yesterday."

"We weren't told by the police, Mr Elachi. We have our own resources." Coraline kept pace with the man, her shotgun case swinging from one hand. "And we can get your daughter back, I swear." Wybie and Maria were only a few steps behind, unobtrusively checking their pistols.

"She is all I have left of her mother," said the man, his voice breaking. "If you can, I will _forever_ be in your debt."

They came to an open door leading into a cramped storage room. Between stacked plastic crates and fluttering shadows, Coraline squinted past at the walls. Elachi moved past her and pulled aside one stack, revealing a waist-high door set into the wall, the painted edges broken and flaking.

"This is what you want?" asked Elachi, puzzled.

"It's a perfect candidate," said Coraline, kneeling down to brush the surface. "Have you ever checked it before?"

"Once, when I first bought the hotel. The way was bricked shut."

"Does it have a key?"

Still puzzled, his eyes betraying reluctant scepticism, Elachi drew out a ring of keys from an inside pocket of his suit jacket, picking out a particularly large and rusty one. Coraline took it and tested it in the door.

With a creak, it swung upon, spilling open a long, dark stretch of tunnel. The walls and floor were rough, hewn from dark, pitted stone, and spider-web patterns of what looked like luminescent moss ran along them. From within, there came the faint scent of honeysuckle.

Elachi's jaw dropped.

It dropped further when Coraline opened her shotgun case and drew out the weapon, a sleek, pump-action gun of blued steel. Wybie and Maria had their own respective pistols ready, a heavy Colt Automatic and a matte-dark Smith & Wesson.

"What is tha … how did it … who …?" Articulation was hard upon first encountering the Sur-real. Coraline could sympathise with Elachi.

"Stay here, sir. We'll be back soon." She got down on her hands and knees and began to crawl through, keeping the shotgun close to her body.

Elachi backed away to give them room, his face taut and unsettled. "God go with you."

"If he likes," commented Wybie, getting down on his hands and knees to follow Coraline. Maria shot a remonstrating look at his back and followed.

* * *

><p>There was a room through the door at the end of the tunnel.<p>

It was an echo of the apartment building lobby, similar in shape and layout. A long wooden desk faced a much-diminished front door. To the right in the wall behind the desk, a door led to the rest of the ground floor. To the left, a wide staircase rose, and made a right turn at a large landing. Striped carpets ran through the centre of the linoleum floor, and plants sat atop battered coffee tables.

But when Coraline unlocked the door at the end of the tunnel, releasing her into this Sur-real realm, there the similarities ended. The atmosphere was dark and cold, and dust and fingers of lichen spread over many of the surfaces. The wooden desk was splintered and choked over with cobwebs, its wood blue with age and peeling paint. The door to the right was barricaded shut with lengths of two-by-four. The carpets on the floor were mere rags loosely connected by fraying strands. Some plants had fallen from their shattered tables and were spilled in a pool of dirt on the floor, the few that remained in their pots were shrivelled and pale, their leaves rustling slightly in some unfelt wind. The great staircase was narrower and cast into shadow, its angles askew. The walls were made from the same cracked, dull, dark blue wood as the desk, made into thin planks between which ragged rents ran. Between those gaps, a cold light spilled in from the outer night sky.

And when Coraline stood up and glimpsed the figure behind the desk, she swore and almost jumped backwards.

"What? What is it …shit!" exclaimed Wybie, scrabbling faster out of the tunnel and grabbing for his pistol, catching sight of the same figure. Maria was close on his heels, and her face shot through with alarm when she saw it.

It was a human-sized doll, its skin made from delicate, pale porcelain, clad in a lacy dress speckled with mould. Its hands were by its sides, palms facing in. Golden lengths of hair fell over its head, over fake red cheeks and over a mouth painted into a glassy smile.

It was hung from a noose, the end of which was tied around the stair banister. The red shoes of the doll swung two feet above the ground.

"It's … oh, thank heavens, it's just a doll," said Maria, clearly rattled, her hand on her gun. The doll smiled at them in silence. Coraline cocked her shotgun.

"Look at its eyes," she said.

Maria and Wybie did so.

Over one eye, there was sewn a large silver button, threaded through with dark tarnish. The other eye was an empty space, a hollow socket which let in no light.

"There's definitely a horla," said Wybie. "That's their calling card."

Coraline pulled her eyes away from the swinging doll, and to the staircase.

There was no sound from upstairs, the only noise in the entire hotel the sound of the rustling plants and the creak of floorboards.

"I take point," said Coraline quietly. "Advance and cover me. Room by room search, until something tries to take us on."

There was then a sudden rattle from the doll, the sound of air passing through a corpse' lungs, and Coraline span on her heel faster than thought to face it, her gun ready. The doll twisted on its rope, swinging until it faced her. Its expression was blank and glassy, its painted teeth shining.

"Stormcrow…" it hissed, a whisper of breath between lips that twitched in a facsimile of movement. "…Futile. Hopeless. Run away. Run far away. You will die. The child is ours."

Coraline regarded it, her eyes like chips of ice. She stepped closer, the shotgun still levelled. Wybie and Maria kept their own pistols on the doll, the mouthpiece of the psychephages.

"We're taking her back," said Coraline, her voice an even cadence. "Make this easy on yourselves and hand her over."

"You will have her bones." The doll twitched on its rope, jerking above the floor, and emitted a short series of dusty barks that approximated laughter. Painted porcelain lips peeled back over red gums. "Bones and dust. We rule here. Turn back or you will die alone. Your friends will die one by one, before your eyes. Your souls will…"

It had no time to speak anything else, as Coraline stepped briskly forward, her shotgun stock blurring in the air and smashing through its head in a cloud of spinning fragments and white dust. Its body flopped to the ground, freed of its noose, and settled in a pile of broken limbs and rags.

"It occurs to me," she said quietly, as the last fragments of the doll clattered on the floor, "That letting something like that try to get to us when there's a despair-eater in the area would be a _really bad idea_."

"'Don't let it get to us', she says just after she smashes its head off," said Maria.

"Less smart remarks, more covering me while I go up the stairs," said Coraline, motioning towards the staircase.

They made their way slowly up the uneven stairs, the old boards creaking under their steps. Coraline was at the head of their arrowhead formation, her eyes tracking across the landing and walls and sloping ceiling. Wybie and Maria were just behind her, their own pistols ready, their eyes alert.

They turned at the landing, and after the shortest of stretches, found another staircase peeling off to their right, leading up to the next floor. There was still no sound, not a squeak, not a breath, not a susurration. Coraline motioned for them to move up, and they did, as quietly and cautiously as they could.

The stairs led up to a wide, gloomy room, spotted with debris, barely lit by the cold light filtered past thin, ragged curtains stretched across the gash in the wall that ran the far length of the room. The room was a mad clothier's junkyard, a graveyard of skeletal frames hung with ancient, muted fabric, piles of rags, racks and splintered hangers, and parts of battered mannequins, coated with fluttering scraps of shadow. The air was shrouded with pale mist, tendrils of it lapping around edges and obstacles and fettering vision.

Dotted here and there on the floor, there were more of the same dolls that they had seen in the ground floor, this time normal-sized. Some of them were unclothed, their porcelain bodies gleaming as pale as milk in the cold light. Most were clothed, in massively frilled dresses or little sailor outfits, all of them looking blankly at nothing at all with hollow eyes.

There was no sound. Coraline slowly took one cautious step forward, her shotgun ready, her pulse all that was audible. She took one more step.

Looking quickly to her left and right, she saw that the stairway had emerged from the centre of a wall running the room's length. There was a door on either side, evenly spaced. She looked again at the room.

"Check the door on the left," she instructed. "One on point, the other two on cover."

Wybie immediately moved to the door, and Maria and Coraline stepped after him, their gazes flitting from his back to the still room.

Wybie squinted through the dusty gloom, his hand shaking slightly on the handle of his pistol as he reached for the door set into the wall, the same dark and drab tone as the wooden boards around it.

He hesitated. No light came through the keyhole or the gaps at the top or bottom, and no sound came from within.

Reaching out a hand, he gently turned the rusty handle and pushed the door open inwards. Stepping through, he took stock of the room, the gloom inside seeming to subside even as he peered.

The room was a wide convex, each wall curving outwards and ending abruptly some twenty feet away at a flat section of wall facing Wybie, on which was hung a tall gilt-edged mirror. Each wall was layered with shelves, low and long and running the length of each wall. Dozens, hundreds, of the same porcelain dolls in old-fashioned outfits were sat along them, their heads lolling dumbly, their empty eye sockets staring straight ahead at nothing.

But as Wybie looked at them, the dolls' heads rose, and each and every one of them slowly rotated to face Wybie, their hollow eyes drinking him in.

A somewhat uncomfortable silence passed. He was aware of Coraline and Maria waiting outside.

"Aaaaand we're getting out of the freaky room," said Wybie out loud, stepping back and grabbing for the door handle. But the door didn't come to his grasp, and when he looked, he saw that it had gone.

A sigh, like the sound of wind over dry paper, sounded to the front of him, and he immediately looked up. He didn't see anything which had moved, except ...

...except for the mirror?

He looked at the mirror and realised with a start that it had never been an exact reflection. The Wybie that looked out from the mirror was waxy-skinned and hunched, his mouth permanently locked in a twisted smile that showed too many teeth. His hollow eye sockets were cast in shadow.

And as Wybie stared at his reflection, the reflection stared at him. It twitched, ever so slightly.

And then it moved suddenly, its expression fixed and empty and smiling, lurching towards the mirror's frame and seizing at it. One leg was hefted over, and the reflected Wybie started to heave itself over the frame.

"Jesus flying Christ!" said Wybie, his eyes wide, his hand flying to raise his gun. "Coraline? Maria? There's something here!" He fired at the oncoming Mirror-Wybie, his first shot going wild, his next shot punching through its left shoulder, and the third smashing through a section of wooden wall. The reflected Wybie spun with the force of the hit, but kept on coming in an uncontrolled hurtle, its hands low against its body, its face still fixed.

Behind it, Wybie caught another glimpse of the mirror. And inside it, another reflection twitched.

* * *

><p>Maria and Coraline had turned instantly at Wybie's first shout, and were rushing to help him when the beldam struck.<p>

She tore herself out from the piles of rags and wooden detritus in the middle of the room, a skeletal figure with dark, knotted skin, as if hewn from lengths of aged wood. Silver buttons gleamed on her thin face, obscured by flying strands of pitch-coloured hair. A tatterdemalion outfit fluttered around her, rags of multi-coloured cloth rudely stitched into a chaotic patchwork shroud. She shrieked with mad triumph as she charged, her foot-tips clacking against the ground, her fingers like wooden needles made fire-hardened and sharp.

"You could have run!" she screeched, her eyes on Coraline as she scuttled. "You could have run! You…"

The shotgun barked and the beldam barely ducked in time to avoid the shell that whistled overhead and punched through the veil at the opposite length, sending it flapping wildly. She was too slow to avoid the follow-shot from Maria, however, and the shot clipped the edge of her chest and sent her spinning and screaming into the debris.

Maria stepped quickly towards the beldam, picking her way briskly over the debris to get in one clear shot. But the beldam, spitting brackish blood where she lay, reached up with furious energy and stroked both her hands along random parts of the chaos around her.

Two humanoid shapes suddenly formed from it, haphazard things with thin wood and wire twisting swiftly together to form their torsos, spiderish limbs, embedded with needles, silvery buttons spooling out of seemingly nothing to make their eyes. The closest one, a tall, thin thing with a mannequin's blank face as its right foot, tore up at Maria with a hooked hand, sending her stumbling back in a hasty effort to avoid it. Her pistol twisted towards it and thundered in the room's close confines, blasting a small, ragged hole through the centre of its chest. It reeled, briefly stunned, then pressed on; the other by its side, a squatter creature with only one silver button-eye.

Maria kept on hopping back from where she'd came, her pistol barking and blasting at the constructs, smashing off scraps of cloth, chunks of torsos, an arm. They slowed, but kept coming.

The shotgun suddenly roared from Maria's side, a sound which nearly blew out her eardrums and sent a streak of flying metal to tear apart the one-eyed construct, sending it flying apart into its individual components across the floor.

Coraline pumped the shotgun, and would have dealt with the other one had the door to the room's right not opened at that moment.

It swung open, with the softest of creaks, and a shadow fell across her mind.

It whispered,

_Lie down and die, you worthless waste of space._

She shrugged off the thought, and turned quickly to see what had come through the door.

The door was only half-open, admitting only a small part of the form of the horla. It was human-shaped and hunched, covered utterly in a great dark grey cloak, its long face partially hidden by a falling hood. What little showed was almost lupine, a smoke-black muzzle set with mottled dagger-like teeth.

It looked up, and the minute she saw what lay beneath the hood, the minute she made contact with the nothingness of the eye sockets, the shadow redoubled.

_Kill yourself and save others the trouble._

The pandaemonium at her back dulled as the horla pressed its mental attack. She sank slightly, the gun falling limp as the creature sidled out from the door and moved closer to her, its curious upright gait carrying it over the floor like smoke.

_You don't deserve to live. You never did. You've failed in all eyes; all despise you when they think of you at all._

It came closer as the gun wavered. One decaying hand drew out from the cloak, tipped with dark, broken claws. A sadistic hiss came from the cloak's depths.

There was a scream from behind Coraline; whether it was from Wybie or Maria, she couldn't guess. But it echoed past the shadow, and knocked her back to what she had to do.

The grasping claw was suddenly smashed to one side with the shotgun's iron-shod stock. The horla yelped with pain, and the stock blurred back before it could react, hammering across its head and sending it down to the floor. It struggled to right itself on the ground, the hood falling back from its face to reveal a long lupine head, black-furred, hollow-eyed, the muzzle slick with slaver and full of bristling teeth.

_You're nothing …_ it started, but Coraline was ready for that and irritably brushed away the shadow, and was ready for the horla's physical attack too. It snapped up at her, but Coraline jumped back, and while the horla was off-balance, shot down at it. Now it was the psychephage's turn to stumble back as the shot tore open the floor at its feet. There was another click as the shotgun was cocked in less than an instant, and the horla retreated as the shotgun tore another fragment from the floor.

The creature rolled and came to its feet by the wall just past the door in the room, leading to the outside. It clenched its claws, and tensed to jump.

But before it could do so, the shotgun spat iron and fire, and crashed into the horla, knocking it backwards with concussive force and smashing it through the thin wall. It teetered on the edge, desperately yowling as its front ran with sickly pale blood from where the shell had torn right through. It grabbed desperately for a purchase on the outside wall, and seized a holding tight with its claws. It pulled itself free from the shattered wall and precarious edge, and began to scrabble up the building's side, backed by the endless empty night without.

Coraline cursed as it escaped, and turned to help the others. Maria, she saw, had dispatched the remaining construct and had opened fire upon the beldam, who scurried between piles of teetering waste to avoid the echoing shots, her earlier bloodlust turned to terror of the iron. Seeing her ally flee, she tensed and sprang straight up, flipping as she did so that she grasped the ceiling with her claws.

A shot tore wood less than an inch from her head, but she ignored it as her leg-points fixed into the wooden ceiling and abruptly expanded outwards, tearing open an aperture from the planks. She dived through, shots smacking into the ceiling after her back.

But before the ceiling sealed shut, Coraline heard a scream from the opening. The scream of a frightened child.

"Come on!" she shouted at the others. "We've got to…" She stopped when she turned to face Wybie, and boggled for a brief moment.

Wybie held his ground in the room and, as best as she could tell, was being mobbed by seven near-exact replicas of himself. Two already lay with bullet holes in them, and were already crumbling into mould and rot. The doubles, reflected as many times as they were, had been made ineffectual; they were capable of little more than flailing awkwardly at him with flopping limbs.

From a certain perspective, it was a hilarious tableau. Coraline, however, was in all-business mode, and she guessed what had happened based on a previous encounter with a horla.

"WYBIE, STOP LOOKING AT THE GODDAM MIRROR!"

"Gah!" he replied, as one of the Mirror-Wybies landed a light smack across his face with a gloved hand, its empty eyes showing no emotion at all for the act. There came two shots from within the melee, and the Mirror-Wybie pitched forward, opened and spilling mould. The others pressed their attack with a little more energy than before.

"When I drop, open fire!" yelled Wybie when he saw Coraline and Maria had lost their own opponents, and suddenly fell to his front.

There was a great deal of noise for a very short while.

When the echoes died away, Wybie crawled out from under the pile of mouldering forms and pulled himself to his feet, brushing himself off. "Well. That was mildly traumatic."

"You were in the thick of it," said Coraline. "You had plenty of opportunities for point-blank shots. Why didn't you take them?"

"Oh, no, I'm quite alright. Don't worry about me. And forgive me if billions of years of evolution have ingrained the notion that 'shooting yourself' isn't a good idea. Or 'yourselves' even."

Coraline walked over, closed her eyes, turned into the room, and fired once to the satisfying retort of shattering glass. She turned and reloaded her shotgun. Her heart raced, her mind still ached from the horla's mental attack, her cheek was cut from a flying splinter, she just noticed. She felt _alive_. And angry.

"Come on," she said, and started at a run for the door from which the horla had emerged. Wybie and Maria ran after her, leaving the room still ringing with echoes and thick with dust and wreckage.

* * *

><p>The last door on the top floor was locked, which is such a relative term when you have a bludgeoning implement at hand. One hard blow from the stock smashed the rusted hinges clean off.<p>

Coraline stood in the doorway, her face glowing with sweat, her gun at the ready. She saw the horla, cringing and bleeding and huddled in a corner. It hissed with hatred when it saw her. Next to it, she saw the beldam, exhausted and hungry. It stepped back when it saw her.

Next to both of them, a man-sized porcelain doll in a navy officer's dress uniform, their face fixed in a blank, reassuring smile, held a little girl tight with one hand clenched around her shoulder. Their other hand held a curved sabre aloft, the blade made of gleaming bronze, ready to be brought down.

"Make one move," snarled the beldam, "Draw one _breath_, and she dies…"

The shotgun was raised and fired in a heartbeat, and the thunderous shot turned the doll's arm to flying powder. The sword fell to the floor, and the doll mindlessly released the child as it bent to retrieve the sword. The girl, who couldn't have been older than eight, ran for it, streaking past Coraline and out into the corridor, where Wybie and Maria waited.

"You know," said Coraline mildly, her tone once more perfectly measured and emotionless, "Out of all the things you could have done, threatening the kid was the most stupid." She turned briefly to give Wybie and Maria a significant nod and then stepped right through, her weapon blazing.

"Um," said Wybie, mildly surprised to suddenly find himself the largest and most reassuring presence in the corridor and hence the first to be seized tight by the girl. "Er. Hi. I'm Wybie. I'm from the government." This didn't seem to reassure the girl, who merely clutched him closer. He awkwardly patted her on the shoulder.

From the room, there came the repeated thunder of the shotgun, and screams and hisses and general clamour.

"Shouldn't we…" said Maria, motioning at the room.

"No. No no no. She sometimes gets a bit … um…" Wybie tried to express it. "Look, best to just stay out of her way. Trust me."

There came the hollow sound of metal ringing on metal, and then a ripping, organic sort of noise, which, coupled with an inhuman screaming, suggested nothing good. Then more shots.

"I want my daddy," said the little girl, who had Elachi's dark hair and eyes.

"We'll get you to him. I promise," said Wybie. The girl looked marginally more reassured.

There came one final shot, a protracted "_Nonononononononoooo…_" finished with a terrifying gurgle, and the sound of a boot stamping into something. After that came an almost blissful silence.

A few moments later, Coraline stepped through from the room. She held the dripping curved sword in her left hand, her shotgun held tight under the same arm. Her coat's front was drenched with dark blood, her hat was askew, and in her other hand, four grey marbles glinted.

"All done," she said simply. And then "Found these in a jewellery box," holding the souls aloft. "If you want to get samples, now's the time, Wybie."

"Will do," he said hurriedly, passing the rapt child onto Maria and drawing out several glass jars from his pocket, and vanishing into the room.

"You don't do things by half-measures, do you?" said Maria, running her eyes up and down Coraline. Maria did her best to refrain from cursing, but she found herself challenged to not do so from shock when viewing the blood down Coraline's front.

"They threatened a kid," said Coraline simply. "We gave them an easy way out at the start, you heard that. Is the kid…?"

"She's alright," said Maria. "Nothing that time can't fix."

After a moment, Wybie emerged, his pockets jangling.

"Shall we go?" he said, trying to wipe his hands off discreetly on the wall.

"Nothing else here," said Coraline. "And the whole thing'll fall apart sooner rather than later. We're done here." Her face betrayed satisfaction and pride. "We're done."


	9. Forestall

When they emerged from the tunnel, the pocket of the Sur-real had already started to split apart behind them. First, the colours were shed in flakes that dulled and grew grey as they fell, covering the ground like ash. A few moments after that, the very matter of the walls and solid surfaces began to crumble away in a gentle entropy, motes falling like stardust into the infinite space around.

Finding out what could happen if you fell into that emptiness was, as far as Coraline was concerned, an experiment that could wait for another day. She got herself and the others out just as the walls had become completely monochrome. She let the girl go through first, and went through last, stopping only to toss the bronze sabre out into the empty entry room.

When she came out after the others, getting a helping hand up from Wybie as she did, she was still wet down the front with psychephage blood, and her steps left dark stains on Mr Elachi's floor. Fortunately, Elachi couldn't give the slightest damn about the blood, preoccupied as he was.

"If there is anything, anything I can give you, or do for you, _anything_…" he would say at length during the few intervals when he would look up from his daughter. "What I owe you can never be repaid, but I'll be damned if I can't try."

"It's nothing anybody else wouldn't have done. You don't owe us anything." This was met with a flat, sceptical look, and further entreaties to owe a favour.

It took a while before they could extricate themselves from the man and his happiness and from the shy thanks of the girl. But before they left the hotel, Coraline ventured a look back at the pair. Wybie noticed.

"Does it ever get better than this?" he asked quietly as they walked through the door, his pockets still jangling with every step.

"No," said Coraline, and as she said it, several years' worth of stress and care vanished from her face to be replaced with a deep and gentle glow of pride and satisfaction. "No, it doesn't."

The city admitted them once again, and let them pass without fanfare. Glittering metal and glass spires caught scraps of the sun, and reflected them off the van's rear-view mirrors.

* * *

><p>Maria took the wheel. Coraline had opted for sitting in the back and taking a nap, and Wybie, who dealt with mild shell-shock as quickly and blithely as he dealt with many things, opted for the same.<p>

From the mirror in front of her, she saw that they were both asleep, and had both slipped sideways in their belts so as to end up leaning against each other, unknowingly supported by the other even in sleep. Coraline had taken off her coat, showing the faint blood stains that had filtered down to her pullover. Save for those, and the motorcycle-engine-esque snores from Wybie, Maria considered it a sweet tableau.

A sharp, indignant blast from another vehicle's horn broke Maria out of considering the tableau and back to steering the van. She remembered that she wasn't a good multitasker, her face flush with embarrassment. The sound broke Coraline and Wybie out of sleep, both of them pulling themselves up, oblivious of their previous position. Coraline grabbed for her hat from where it had fallen to the seat.

"Where are we?" she asked, her voice thick with sleep.

"Nearly in D.C.," answered Maria tersely, keeping her eyes straight ahead. "We'll be back in about a half-hour." The sky outside was turning to evening, with rosy fingers pressing through the grey banks of clouds.

"I hope Sayid enjoyed his brief reign of terror," said Wybie, rubbing his eyes. "Let's hope Tripod kept him in line."

"Let's hope the complex's still standing," said Coraline, looking out the window. "And let's hope Skirving's tried nothing behind our backs…"

"No talking while I'm driving," said Maria, her eyes still straight ahead.

"Not even a little talking?"

"If you talk while I drive, then what happens is that I get distracted by your talking, and while my attention's split, I can't pay attention to the road, and then we end up going up in a fireball."

"You've got a very special sort of mind, have you ever been told?"

"Fireball, or I pull over and slap you both senseless. No talking."

Buildings tumbled upwards from the roadside. "What if we …" The look on Maria's face in the rear-view mirror stopped all dissent. They sped on in silence, and the District unfolded before them. They drove down concrete veins through the outer edges, past token greenery and tilting buildings and shadow-eclipsed flags.

Coraline let herself sit back in the car seat, satisfied. The mission couldn't have had a better outcome, as far as she was concerned. They'd gotten the kid out and alive, nobody had been hurt, and she'd been able to take out the two psychephages.

She planned to treat herself to a beer or three and unwind once they'd gotten back to the complex. The prospect took shape, a warm and inviting possibility on the horizon.

The Thaddeus Complex homed into view before too long, and as they neared, a familiar figure opened the door. Sayid waved at them as they parked before the doors, and Tripod's head appeared crouched between his feet.

"Sayid," said Coraline, getting out from the van, holding her shotgun case in one hand and her coat under one arm. "You know how you keep on telling us you've always disliked promotions and you'd be as soon rid of one as get …" She stopped. Sayid's face was lost of its usual ebullient zest, and looked drawn and concerned. Something must have gone horribly wrong with the universe. "Sayid? You okay?"

"Um, yeah. I'm okay. It's …" Sayid rubbed the back of his head uncomfortably. "There's … something's been going on with the other departments. I've only caught a few of their messages, but I think they're talking a lot more than often about us…"

Coraline glumly saw the image of a ice-cold beer dissolve and slip away like mist, and knew that the rest of her day would inevitably consist of paper chases and hunting down other department secretaries to find out what exactly was going on.

"I think I know what he's talking about," said Maria from one side. "I tried to mention it to you, but you wanted to deal with it later."

"Looks like it's now later," muttered Coraline, kneading her forehead with her free hand. "Urrgh. Look, Wybie, you go and get this written up, do paperwork, keep business rolling. Sayid, you get our stuff packed away. Maria, take your computer and dig up what you can on what's going on."

"What are you going to do?" asked Wybie, poking his head from around the van's side. Coraline passed her shotgun case and coat to Sayid, and then answered.

"I'm going to kill someone before the day's out. Most likely damned _Skirving_. Wish me luck," she said, turning on her heel and advancing determinedly into the city. Sayid and Maria nodded uncertainly, while Wybie raised one hand and called out, as tactfully as he could.

"Uh, you've still got a bit of blood on your…"

* * *

><p>"Ahem."<p>

Skirving, who was leaning against a wall in an unoccupied corridor in the White House, looked up.

"Ms Jones," he said, his expression as warm and welcoming as a sheer cliff of Arctic ice. "And here I was hoping for a petty distraction from these housing reports. Obviously, saying your prayers pays off."

"Mr Skirving," said Coraline, with an expression as sharp as an obsidian knife, "I've been experiencing some recent problems in my post. I was hoping your experience could shed some light on my predicament."

"How could I refuse such a charming request?"

"Very well. Apparently, someone in this building has proposed that the federal department that I'm associated with be _closed down_. Do any obvious candidates for such a heinous act spring to mind?"

"The process of elimination is your friend here, I think," said Skirving, turning back to the folder in his hand. "Who, in this building, has previously espoused taking federal waste out behind the back with a shotgun? And who among these people is trying to attend to their actual work, hoping that the person that they're reluctantly engaging in conversation takes the hint?"

"What the hell do you think you'll do?" said Coraline, her tone low and deadly. "You've tried this before. You've tried this crap three times before, and you've been shot down by the other departments before. I've bumped into and spoken to Montjoy and Solokov, and their positions haven't changed. What the hell are you going to do apart from waste _my_ time and yours?"

Skirving snapped the folder shut. His cold gaze turned to fix Coraline with a flat regard.

"You're a waste of space. A waste of money. Money that could be going towards Medicaid, defence, education, _anything_. And you've hung on by a thread, only because a few others haven't dared to set a necessary precedent. The situation's changed. I have the majority I need. And you are going to become an _irrelevance_. Give it a day or two." Skirving looked at her with an expression that blended indifference and contempt, and kept it frozen. "You've got black down your front, did you know?"

Coraline ignored the last comment. "Trying to scare me won't work, Mr Skirving. And I don't know who you're trying to con. Me, or yourself."

"Why would you wonder that? You of all people should know about conning others. Was there anything else?"

"Nothing else here," said Coraline, turning to leave. "You're not the only one who feels their time's getting wasted."

"Oh," Skirving called after her back, almost as an afterthought. "In case you were wondering, I spoke with the most relevant person concerning lost electronic spies. And his department hasn't recorded a single lost piece of hardware of that description. Whatever other investigations have been carried out have turned up nothing. I reported as such to the President. Whatever you were trying to accomplish in the cabinet room failed."

She left the White House, past the Secret Service agents and Marines on duty, and down the steps at the building's front, moving like a brooding stormcloud. Her expression remained neutral, but she burned within, too furious to focus on anything else, on what Skirving had told her at the last.

_To hell with Skirving_ had been her default mode of thinking for a good few years now, and she saw no reason to change it now. _To hell with his arrogance, to hell with his obstruction, and to hell with his general person for good measure._

She headed back, knowing that she'd have to dig out anything legal held in the Thaddeus Complex and spend hour after brain-congealing hour going through them, researching their options if being dissolved was on the line, the same rigmarole she'd gone through three times before and loved no better for it.

And it had been such a good day, as well.

* * *

><p>"He's got his majority."<p>

Both Coraline and Maria said it the instant Coraline opened the front door. There was a slight pause, and then Maria gestured for Coraline to go first.

"Skirving was his usual warm, loving, compassionate self," Coraline said, taking off her hat. "And in between his expressions of fondest friendship and his solicitations after my good health and that of my loved ones, he said that he was trying to get us shut down again, and that he finally had the majority in the cabinet he needed to get it done. Which you found out as well, I take it."

"Not in so many words, but it made sense," said Maria. "I got that they were trying to shut us down again, and Skirving wouldn't try that unless he had some new reason."

"Who's he gotten on his side?" demanded Coraline. "Who's he got working against …" She stopped and breathed out, running a hand through her hair. "I'm going to see Wybie about this. Then I'm going to look out anything we'll need if it comes down to a legal fight. Then I'm going to track down Skirving and whoever he's pulled over to his side and goddamn punch them until candy comes out."

"Why do so many of the people you interact with end up being threatened with bodily harm?"

"Because so many of them deserve it. I'll catch you later if you can help me with some of the paperwork."

She walked through the complex's winding corridors, making brief stops in out-of-the-way offices to collect a small binder or single piece of paper (why they couldn't just remain in one place for easy access defied investigation. In her more paranoid moments, she suspected the complex was screwing with them) and added it to a growing pile in her arms. Tripod peeled off from a set of shadows in his usual manner and fell into lopsided step alongside her, regarding her with feline disdain as she opened doors with increasing difficulty.

By the time Coraline got to Wybie's lab, the stack of paper she held could easily concuss if dropped from a height, and she only opened the door with the creative application of her foot and shoulder in tandem, sending a few sheets fluttering to the floor in the process.

Wybie looked up from his kneeling position in the centre of the floor. He was overlooking what could only be No. Nineteen, its cords lying splayed like the legs of a spider. Several spare coils of thick cord lay behind him, spread-out notes to his right, and the half-dozen or so jars of fresh specimens all around him.

"Hey," he said, little enthusiasm in his voice.

"I went out and had a civil discussion with Skirving," said Coraline, retrieving the papers. "It's definitely another attempt to close us down. I've just been getting paperwork for when he tries something." She set the paper down atop a workstation and moved closer to Wybie. "Are the new samples helping?"

"I don't know," said Wybie. "I haven't tried them yet. And you know what? I doubt they will." He shot a look of uncharacteristic bitterness at the Eroder on the floor. "Why should they? I don't know what I can change. I've applied every combination of Sur-real tissue I can with any configuration of the machine. Why should it work now? _What am I missing?_"

Coraline knelt down beside him, and patted his shoulder while he rubbed a set of knuckles into his forehead.

"It's just the same old, same old," he said. "I'm making something not work, you're getting distracted from what's important by Skirving, and we're on the brink of getting shut down. Where the hell did we fall into this rut? Something needs to happen. I need inspiration. I need this to work. I need something to work."

"We've been doing good work already," said Coraline gently. "You may recall that little girl and her father from a few hours ago. We've got a few things working for us."

"We need more things to work for us," said Wybie. "I don't … I don't want things to happen that make what happened to you yesterday…" He broke off suddenly and laughed, his tone low and sardonic. "Now hang on, when did I say our positions could reverse?"

"You don't get a say in it," said Coraline with a smile. "We just support each other as and when needed. That's how it's always worked."

"Yeah." His hand drifted up and found hers at his shoulder. They held each other's hands for a quiet minute, before letting them drop.

"You ever … thought about us?" he said shyly, almost as if he was twelve again. "The times we tried in high school and college, I remember things always got in the way."

"Things and arguments and stupid things and awkwardness and stupider things," replied Coraline. "And heavens know there're things to get in the way now."

"At least the things back then didn't try to eat your soul," said Wybie.

"Well, apart from the first Beldam and the Czarina," said Coraline. "And the other beldam that tried to get us during the senior prom."

"Yeah, that was not the most successful prom night ever," said Wybie with rueful remembrance. "It was a pity. You were wearing a really pretty dress as well. And as far as I thought at the time, wielding that fire axe made you look even hotter."

"I never did manage to get the beldam blood out of that dress. Or explain things properly to Mr Sanchez. And you didn't do too badly yourself with that fire extinguisher."

"Please, me and Maria just held it down. You were the one who went in with the vorpal blade." His face broke into a smile like a sunbeam, full of life and humour. "Man, the looks on everyone's faces at the beginning, before I got them out with the fire alarms."

"That's the strange thing," said Coraline on a thoughtful tangent. "It's strange that all the most distinctive things we've ever done have involved the Sur-real. It even got into, well, something you'd have expected to be just normal. It got a hold on us from the start. Wybie?" She had suddenly noticed that, halfway through her talking, a strange look had come onto his face, and he was starting to stare fixedly at the Eroder, his lips moving slightly.

"Wybie?"

"Don't … It's …" He frowned. "I … could you give me a … Something's just occurred." He snatched up paper and a pen from the floor and held them at the ready. "I've got something I think I can do here. Something's just occurred to me." His pen jabbed and flew across the paper into a fastly-illegible scribble. "Something may well have just occurred to me, and _I-may-have-just-cracked-it._"

"Should I back away from the science?" said Coraline.

"Science, science," muttered Wybie, his pen flying. "Hypothesis, test hypothesis, replicate test, promote to theory, frickin' _obvious_ now…"

Coraline backed out, a smile touching her lips, giving him space to work while she got on with her own. It was good to see him so excited and upbeat after a dip in his mood. And it had been good to have the talk with him.

She doubted he had actually stumbled onto something really new, but at least he was likely to have more fun than she was about to.


	10. Advancement

**A/N: While writing this chapter, I had what I refer to as an "Oh dear. Chronology." moment, where I picked out a particular day and then checked it against a day offered at random in an earlier chapter, and realised that at some critical stage the characters had wandered into some sort of time muck-up that would have had the Doctor scratching his head for weeks.**

**So now Chapter Five, Chapter Six and the earlier portions of Chapter Seven have been slightly amended to take place on a Friday, rather than a Sunday as was originally written. I hope this might clear up any confusion (or at least avoid creating new confusion.) We now return you to your regularly scheduled fic.**

* * *

><p>With Sunday came, of all things, sunshine. The past morass of iron-grey clouds had been shouldered aside during the night, and now Washington DC shone as if burnished. The light glanced off metal and warmed concrete and poked its way past windows. The last day of March was making up for lost time.<p>

One window in particular posed a problem for the sun, as the blinds running down it had been closed. Only the thinnest strips of light filtered past to illuminate the small room and the table and few shelves therein, as well as the sleeping form of Coraline at the table. Her head lay on her arms, which were folded on top of a spread stack of paper.

There wasn't a sound, apart from the gentle ticking of a clock and the faint sound of Coraline's snores.

Then there was a sudden creak and bang as the door was flung open, spilling in light from the corridor, silhouetting the shape of Sayid. He stood with one arm behind his back, a whistle on his lips, and he stepped briskly inside, kicking a wedge against the door as he went. Coraline stirred and made a sound somewhere between a befuddled groan and a threatening growl.

"Shame to leave this room dark," commented Sayid brightly, stepping around the table and reaching to pull the blinds open, loosing a tidal wave of too-bright light into the room. Coraline's growl intensified, and her hands strained against the table to push herself up. "There. Much better, don't you agree?"

Coraline sat upright, and clawed blearily at her eyes while blinking around her. She looked from the clock on one wall to Sayid to the clock again, her gaze skipping painfully past any especially bright parts.

"Didn't that clock used to say four o'clock?" she said at length.

"Now it says eight o'clock," said Sayid, one hand still behind his back. "You see, time is a linear concept that we use to define the progression of …"

"Sayid," said Coraline, deciding on the most diplomatic terms she felt capable of mustering, "There is nothing in the world I hate more than you at the moment. Go and die in a hole."

"Is that any sort of way to greet your dutiful intern?" asked Sayid, crooking one eyebrow. "Your dutiful intern, who did nothing but ensure you wouldn't miss any part of your exciting day of work?"

"Die in a _feculent_ hole."

"Doesn't all this sunshine make you feel alive? Doesn't it just make you want to spread your arms wide and dance out into the streets, singing of life and happiness, filling you with cheer and energy and a zest for the new day…"

"You are being _deliberately_ aggravating."

"Am I? Hardly. I'm only spreading cheer and joy to wherever it'll be accepted. Maybe you'd like…"

"I have a _gun_ under my desk."

Sayid quickly drew his hand from behind his back and proffered a cup of coffee as a peace offering. Coraline stared owlishly at it, and then wordlessly took it.

"This," she started, taking a quick drag on the steaming dark liquid, "_This_, and this alone, gets you a stay of execution."

"I just went out and got a batch. Ms Ortega phoned to say she'd be in soon. Mr Lovat's … been preoccupied."

"Preoccupied how?" Coraline took another sip, the initial scalding insulating her from this one. "Since when?"

"Since last night. He's been working the night away in his lab."

"That's … damn," said Coraline. "He's been that committed? I should check in on him."

"When you see him, tell him it's a trifle rude to just _snatch_ coffee out of someone's hands," said Sayid, backing out the door. "I'm just going to get some dissertation work done. If there's nothing else…?"

"Nothing else. Dissert away." Sayid left, and Coraline finished the coffee in silence, looking over the papers she'd compiled all last night.

First, she'd clean up. Then she'd go and file the papers with whichever nameless functionary needed them for the entire system of government to not collapse. And then she'd check on Wybie. From all sounds of it, progress was being made.

* * *

><p>Some short time later, Maria was walking briskly through the streets back to the complex. The sun beat down across her shoulders, unhindered by the city's modest skyline, and lightened the load of her bag at her side as she walked, humming idly.<p>

She'd just been at church, and had made confession for good measure. (The priest had often advised her to seek psychological counselling, but had never pressed the matter.) The nature of her job meant that she often made up for lost time on the days when she was busy, and she felt it never hurt to keep herself on reasonable terms with God when her job was as potentially lethal as it was.

Besides, the Monday tomorrow would be Easter Monday. It was an auspicious date.

She hoped this weather would persist for it.

As she walked past another long corridor of parked cars and large houses, and turned a corner onto a street lined with rustling trees, she noticed, whether openly or only in the corner of her mind, three things.

First, that a small grey-white tuft of cloud had clung on for dear life in the middle of the skyline, and only slightly besmirched the view. It was small, but it annoyed her.

Secondly, that Coraline was at the far end of the street, and heading in a different direction. Maria considered calling out, but didn't. She wasn't a natural shouter, and Coraline was too far away. Besides, they'd meet in the complex soon enough anyway.

Thirdly, and this wasn't carried to the front of Maria's mind, that a helmeted driver atop an electric motorcycle was beside her in the road in her peripheral vision, a motorcycle that she had seen several other times over the past few days.

The driver kept along at a gentle pace, their motorcycle's electric engine reduced to a near-silent purr.

* * *

><p>At one corner of the complex in Nebraska Avenue, James Malinois stepped out onto the street at the same moment that Coraline crossed his path. The man was accompanied by a somber-looking agent, a bulge evident under his coat. Malinois looked up in surprised recognition.<p>

"Ms Jones? Good to meet you again."

"…Malinois, was it? Nice to see you as well." Coraline waved the much-diminished stack of paper. "I didn't get a chance to talk to you yesterday. What have you heard about a move to shut down my department?"

"Shut down your department?" Malinois frowned. "I haven't heard … anything about that. What's happened? Is it Skirving who's started it?"

"I assumed you'd know," said Coraline, fixing him with a look. "You came over to my department a couple of days ago at his behest, didn't you?"

"No. I came at my own behest," said Malinois, who looked hurt. "I spoke to the scientist attached to your department, and I never knew about anything else happening to you beyond that. Why would I work with Skirving?"

"Currying favour?" said Coraline, only partially convinced. There was nothing like paperwork to sour her mood.

"Skirving's not the person to give favour," said Malinois. "He doesn't like waste. He doesn't like small departments doing jobs that could easily fall under the purview of larger departments. If he had his way, Homeland Security would be folded back into Defence and the CIA. I'm at as much risk from him as you."

"If you say so."

"He's kept me in the dark about your department as well," protested Malinois. He checked his watch. "Look, I've got to go. I'm due to arrive at the official compound in Maryland soon. There's reports about Iranian saboteurs I've got to handle, and more talk about incitement against our embassies, and a hundred other things."

"So I take it you're not attending the Easter Egg Roll tomorrow?" Coraline asked with a wry smile. Malinois responded with a wryer one.

"I'll leave that to others. But look, for what my advice is worth, stay here so you can stay on top of things. Keep close to Skirving so he doesn't have room to breathe."

"That was already my plan," responded Coraline. Malinois shrugged, almost apologetically, before moving past her to a security car. He opened the back door, beating the agent to the punch, and stopped only to wave at Coraline before closing the door. The car started moving away with a gentle throttle from the engine, and picked up speed as it went.

Coraline watched him go, and then dismissed him from mind and continued along the street. She wanted to get back to the Thaddeus Complex, and to check on Wybie before something inevitably went on fire.

* * *

><p>"That joke's been done," said Wybie as she entered and opined as such.<p>

"Not enough, judging by the scorch marks on the walls," she said to his back, his entire form crouched over something on the floor. He wore a blast helmet and thick gloves, and a sharp hissing and fierce light came from a blowtorch before him.

"Those are old scorch marks. And it was only _two_ times. I don't see why that should make it a running gag." His voice was slightly hesitant and slurred, as if fatigue was only now starting to kick in and impede him. Coraline regarded the trailing cable of the blowtorch with some alarm.

"Indulge me," she said, stepping closer, to just within easy grabbing distance. Wybie clicked the blowtorch off, and set it down gently on the floor before reaching for a small set of pliers on the ground. To his front, Coraline saw two long wire-tendrils leading off to either side.

"Are you making progress? Can you tell at whatever stage you're at?"

"Don't ask me to answer that," retorted Wybie, his back still turned. "If I openly speculate on No. Twenty, then it's automatically doomed to horrible failure. It's been proven by science."

"Is that true?"

"Who's the scientist?"

"Right. How long until you're free of this thing's spell?"

"Um…" Wybie stuck out a hand and waggled it vaguely. "About that long."

"Tell you what, I'll come back in a few hours. If you're done by then, all well and good. If you're not done and you're still working on it, because I'm such a good friend, I'm going to knock you out and make sure you get some sort of sleep."

"Sure," he said, still vague.

"And if you touch anything sharp or which produces fire, I'm going to be obliged to break your arms for your own good."

Wybie made another vague noise of assent, his concentration muted by fatigue and focused on the machine.

* * *

><p>It was a few hours later.<p>

"Well?" said Coraline from the doorway. Maria stood beside her, arms folded behind her back.

Wybie looked up and gave them a tired smile. He sat reclined against one wall, one leg flat and the other folded, one hand holding a cup of by-now frozen coffee, the other stroking Tripod's back, who lay beside him soaking up the attention and the dimming light from the skylight.

"Done," he said. "Finished piecing it together just half-an-hour ago. And I put it through its first and second tests, so once I've finished this cup, all we need to do is check it with this fuzzy little sociopath-"

Tripod, his eyes closed and back flat, idly flicked his tail by way of acknowledgement.

"-And if he starts talking, then I can heave a sigh of relief, and we … we can get the acknowledgement we finally need."

"If it works," said Coraline, crouching down and looking at No. Twenty. It was of similar design to the others, a chrome cuboid of metal plates and coiled wires, smaller and somehow more contained than its predecessors. A lid on top was open, revealing an aperture into which a sample could be placed.

"Why so confident about this one?" asked Coraline. "What was your insight yesterday?"

Wybie didn't answer immediately, but stopped to put down his coffee and pick up a small glass jar and a small, sharp knife from the floor beside him. He stood up laboriously, idly spinning the knife in his grasp.

"I was doing the wrong thing before," he said. "I was on the right track. I knew that the Sur-real energy bound up within our samples could resonate with the Sur-real overlapping the area around the Eroder. But I wasn't taking into account one thing. How do Sur-real places overlap with the real world in the first place?"

"Enlighten us, Mr Scientist."

"Mr Scientist. I like the sound of that. I should put it on business cards." Wybie paused for effect, and was rewarded with a sharp cough from Coraline.

"There's a reason the Sur-real bleeds over in old or important buildings. There's a reason psychephages haunt these buildings and flourish there. It's because _we're_ there."

He unscrewed the top of the jar.

"It's not a one-way transfer of energy. Psychephages feed on us. They need our energy for their own. They exist in a cycle with us and reality." Wybie paused to hold the knife's handle with his mouth while he took off a glove. "Ehhgwo, if w' mixth t'g'r pfkifage n' … excuse me, if we produce an eroding effect from a combination of Sur-real and real matter, it actually _works_. I've tested it with two different samples, mixed with a drop or two of my own blood, and each time it's produced a much greater effect than it did before."

"Blood ritual," said Coraline lightly, masking her own surprise at the insight. "What the hell, the fundamentalists never liked us much anyway."

"Not much blood. Only a drop at most, and I think you could safely substitute hair or spit or anything." Coraline looked at his hand while he spoke, and saw a small cut in the ball of his thumb.

"Well, then what are we waiting for? Let's give it a third try."

"Twentieth time's the charm." Wybie applied pressure to his thumb tip just above the jar, and after a little coaxing, a small drop fell down into the tarry mix in the bottom of the jar. He then knelt to place it into the aperture at the top of the machine, and closed the lid.

"Everyone in the circle?" he asked. "Tripod in the circle?"

"Got him," said Maria, reaching out and picking up the cat and gently depositing him next to the Eroder, which he regarded with a haughty look.

"Then let's go."

Wybie pressed down a switch on the Eroder's side, and the world shifted.

The air briefly buzzed with static electricity, a pulse that swept through the air and stood Coraline's hair on end. The very texture of the air shifted to something alien yet oddly familiar, a tone akin to the feel of the Sur-real lairs they had entered many a time. The scent of honeysuckle rose at once, initially overpowering and quickly fading to a background smell, and making the air somehow old, into a medium thick with history and potential and power.

It was exhilarating and foreboding, eldritch and uncanny, a brief moment of transition for the world in the circle.

Then it passed. The scent of honeysuckle remained, and the air was yet buzzing faintly with new, agitated power.

All three watched the three-legged cat with taut anticipation, watching Tripod glance around at the room, at the Eroder, at the three expectant humans.

Then his mouth opened, and words came forth.

"Well, _hell_. Turns out you tin-openers are actually good for a few other things. I may have to upgrade my opinion of you a notch."


	11. Morrow

If you had just made an unprecedented scientific breakthrough, then, after you were done waving your arms and shouting excitedly, it was generally considered good practise to carry out documentation.

A _lot_ of documentation.

"State your name for the benefit of the camera," said Wybie to Tripod, who sat with ill-disguised boredom in the middle of the resting camera's view point.

"_I_ don't have a name. I _know_ who I am, without the need for a label. _You_ call me Tripod. And I've been meaning to have a word with you about that."

"Oh, and this begins Interview No. 1 with Test Subject Alpha, dated the thirty-first of March, two thousand and twenty-four. Probably should have put that in at the beginning," said Wybie absently.

"The way you tin-openers manage to undermine yourselves so quickly after doing something worthy is a constant source of amusement to us, you realise that? It's like nepeta, but it never stops."

"As seen, the erosion of real/Sur-real barriers has been successfully achieved by the Eroder Mark Twenty, an effect which evinces itself, amongst other things, in allowing verbal communication between humans and cats. Would you care to demonstrate this again, Tripod?"

"That damn name again. I know you're talking to me; you don't have to keep bringing it up. Are you frightened that you'll forget everything about your partner in a conversation halfway through? That would explain a lot about your species if so."

"The cause of this effect has yet to be determined. Multiple hypothesises have been devised; including cats being creatures of simultaneously real and Sur-real attributes, the erosion of the Sur-real barrier enabling universal comprehension, regardless of species, or perhaps the physical alteration of cats by the properties of the Sur-real."

"From now on, you will address me with no name. To get my attention, a simple call will suffice. Use that name for conversations between yourselves if you must, but don't inflict it on me where I can hear it."

Wybie looked around, and scratched his head vaguely, his fatigued eyes dipping in and out of concentration. "Um, let me think of another question."

"Are you even listening to me?"

"Wybie, get some sleep," said Coraline, mercy plucking at her conscience. "Do this tomorrow when you're at the top of your game. We can get everything we need done then."

"One more thing," said Wybie, rallying briefly. "Tripod, I'm going to deactivate the Eroder field. Keep talking after I do so, and let me see if the effect dissipates." He reached down and thumbed a switch on the machine's side.

"…Super. He enables understanding between Grimalkind and the Binadamu, and what does he do? Ignores the other side and just makes excited noises. You realise that this is a problem that applies to your en_wwrrr mmewrr_." Tripod sneezed, surprised, and then looked away in exasperation. The energy that had filled the room was fading, and Wybie reached out to switch the camera off.

There was a loud crack from it and he withdrew his hand, and stared at the smoke spilling out in oily trickles from its depths. He slapped his forehead.

"Sur-real, meet tech. Tech, meet Sur-real. Well, that was a wasted fifteen minutes."

"_Mrrew_," said Tripod by way of frustrated agreement.

Coraline gave him a sympathetic pat to one shoulder. "We'll just drag someone here and get them to watch. Tomorrow." Her voice sharpened with barely-restrained pleasure at the prospect. "The look on Skirving's face will be something that'll keep me warm inside for years after, I just know."

"Tomorrow," said Maria thoughtfully. "Easter Monday and the first of April. How long do you think it'll be before people realise it's not a joke?"

"Too long. We have to get this settled once and for all." Coraline turned to the door. "Everyone get some sleep. Let's get ourselves ready."

* * *

><p>The cool light of evening melted away before night, tipping past the horizon to yield to a blackness studded with stars, a mirror of the shining cityscape. Lights blazed steadily above and below, vying to outshine the other.<p>

Before long, tendrils of pink and yellow crept back over the east, shoving away the stars and dimming the city. The sun followed hard on their heels, a coin that rose fraction by fraction and cast the world into light. Not a single cloud was there to impede it.

Whatever else, All Fool's Day and Easter Monday would have their sun.

Coraline woke with the dawn, rising from her bed in her relatively Spartan apartment. She washed herself, got dressed, and ate a small breakfast as quickly as possible, eager to get the day on the move.

She stepped out just as the city began to buzz with the recently awoken, coming alive with work and bustle after the weekend. It was only a short walk from her apartment building to the Thaddeus Complex, but the way was choked with blaring cars and milling pedestrians. Her heavy coat, peaked cap and blue hair only got a few token glances on the way, which she ignored.

She crossed paths with Maria and Wybie on the way, one of them wide awake, the other still yawning. Sayid had Mondays and Tuesdays off, and Coraline knew he had his own work to keep him busy.

"So," said Coraline, skipping preamble as they walked. "Ready to turn the world as humankind knows it on its head?"

"Ready and eager," said Maria, absently checking her inbox with her phone. Wybie, as sleepy-eyed as he was, seemed distracted by something.

"What sort of documentation do you think I'll have to submit?" he asked. "A full report and dissertation, of course, and transcripts of the first conversations with Tripod. What else? The samples I used? A full history of the development of the Eroder? What am I missing? Is there something I'm missing?"

"Wybie, my college degree was in American History," said Coraline. "You're the one sitting on a physics degree. I'm not sure how much help I can be here unless a working knowledge of the aftermath of the _Amistad_ revolt can help your case."

"Maria, forensic science any good to me?"

"I wouldn't count on it."

"Dammit," he muttered. "Dissertation, transcripts, samples, study history. Should the Eroder have a patent? And … is that Tripod?"

They looked up at that observation, and saw that it was indeed Tripod approaching them at a lurch down the street.

"That's odd," said Coraline. "He doesn't normally leave the complex."

The cat neared them, _mrrw_ing at the top of his lungs, fixing his gaze right upon them. He stopped in front of them, and jerked his head back along the street, in the direction of the Thaddeus Complex.

"What's that you say, boy?" said Wybie, kneeling down. "Timmy fell down another well?"

Tripod looked back along the street and hissed and arched his back, his tufted fur bristling.

"Timmy's being attacked by a snake? Timmy's playing with matches and kerosene? Timmy's juggling toasters in the bathtub?"

There was the feline equivalent of an exasperated yowl, and Tripod delivered it while arching his tail in the direction of the complex while staring Wybie down.

A dark suspicion stole over Coraline's mind.

"Wybie," said Coraline quietly. "Maybe you shouldn't be the one talking to the cats." She knelt down beside Tripod, who was by then bashing his head repeatedly against the sidewalk. "Is there something going on at the complex?" she asked. Several passers-by gave her odd looks and a wide berth. Tripod rolled his eyes back in his head with relief, and nodded firmly towards the complex.

Several scenarios came to Coraline's mind, none of them good. "Come on," she said to Wybie and Maria, rushing in the direction indicated by Tripod. She was only barely aware of them following her, focused as she was on moving quickly.

And when she turned the last corner on the last street a couple of minutes later and saw the complex, she knew the worst had happened.

The windows of the complex were open to the sun, each set of curtains having been pulled back by someone other than the department. Tire tracks were evident in the grass around it, and an agent in a dark suit stood in front of the main door.

"This building is closed to access, ma'am," said the man as Coraline advanced. "Please step back."

"This is my department's headquarters," said Coraline, her voice taut with suppressed anger, her hand clenched around her proffered ID. "I have every right to access it."

The man glanced at the ID over the top of his glasses.

"Ms Jones, your department's legitimacy is under dispute, and the Thaddeus Complex has been closed to you. Were you not informed via the federal intranet earlier?"

"Our intranet-linked computer is in the building, and we didn't receive any message yesterday. How could we have been informed? And when the hell was our department's legitimacy questioned?"

"To the best of my knowledge, the measure was pushed through late last night. It received the necessary support in the cabinet, and you were informed via…"

"I know that we're entitled to more warning time than _this. _Who the hell's pushed this through? And how many federal safeguards and laws do you think they've broken?"

"I couldn't comment," said the agent, his expression level, his tone unsympathetic. "Regardless, I've been ordered to keep this building closed until a full audit has been completed."

Fury broiled through Coraline's veins. Whoever was springing this was deliberately trying to destroy her department. And whether their timing was accidental or deliberate …

(_Deliberate_, whispered a tiny part of her. _No way in hell is this chance_.)

… they needed what was inside the building. They needed the Eroder.

She could discuss rights of access with the agent until she was blue in the face, and Coraline suspected it wouldn't do her any good. He was under orders, which was always a dangerous state. And she needed the machine quickly, if the shut-down was being forced this quickly.

Her mind alit upon another solution.

She turned away from the agent without a word, and walked briskly back along to the street corner where Wybie and Maria, caught off guard by her run towards the centre, were only now catching out.

"They've shut us down," she said simply. "We can't get access to the complex."

"What? How can they do that?" said Wybie. "_Can_ they do that?"

"They can't," replied Maria. "They've got to give us some sort of forewarning. We've got to be able to present our case, access our materials to do our jobs."

"So someone's playing a little loose with the law? Interesting," said Coraline, turning to look back at the complex. "Well, that makes me feel much better about what I'm about to do."

"Why? What are you about to do?"

* * *

><p>The irregularity of the Thaddeus Complex extended to its outside. Parts of the building protruded from the rest, forming a few unintentional alleyways leading to dead ends past overshadowed walls.<p>

Superfluous windows were set into some of these walls.

And from one of the windows, there was the sound of breaking glass.

"Careful when climbing over," said Coraline, picking herself gingerly over a frame set with broken glass. "Slipping … could lead to problems."

"Merciful God, we're going to jail," said Maria, following her. "We're breaking into a federal building, and we're going to jail after this."

"It's our own complex. It's got only our stuff in it," said Coraline. "And once we show them what we can do, they won't press charges."

"And the windows aren't alarmed. Nobody bothered upgrading the place since the Cold War," added Wybie, climbing over the broken window with especial care. "And now it occurs to me that we've been pretty lucky to not have been broken into before." Behind him, Tripod tensed and pounced right over the window, wobbling slightly mid-transit.

"I think it's the building's shape. If people look at it for too long, their brain gets tied in knots," said Coraline, glancing down an unlit corridor. There were no sounds from any other people in the building. Maybe they were still waiting for an audit team. Maybe.

"Come on," said Wybie, taking the lead. "It's not too far from here to my lab. And this is kind of fun. We're more like those federal agents you see in films, whose job seems to consist of breaking into places and having gunfights."

"That's the thing," said Maria. "That's the situation. We're breaking into _our own_ complex, to retrieve a machine that can _mould together worlds_, after being warned of something going wrong by a _talking cat_."

"Maria, are you implying that the situations in which we find ourselves aren't entirely normal?"

"Just a little bit."

Coraline, ignoring the conversation, saw a familiar door.

"There's your lab, Wybie. Let's just get the Eroder and get out."

"Sure thing." He brushed past her, and took out a ring of keys from a pocket and tested one in the lock. The door swung open.

Coraline stepped through.

And then she knew when the auditors had arrived.

Although it was hard to get the lab much more chaotic than it had already been, someone had given it a really good try. Paper and machines and jars and wires lay strewn in an even greater state of disorder. Drawers had been left open, and the wall set with whiteboards had lost some of its load, one board lying amidst fallen post-it notes.

Wybie immediately ran forwards while Coraline thought dark thoughts about the capacity for bad situations to always get worse.

Wybie checked over every workstation surface, his eyes moving in a blur. He knelt down abruptly and hurled open a particular drawer. He looked through it, and reached in and rummaged amidst scraps of paper frantically, and then drew away.

"Someone's taken it," he said, his voice quiet as he tried to process the implications. "Someone's taken them both."

"What've they taken?" asked Coraline, though she already half-suspected the answer.

"Someone's taken the binder with all our stuff on the psychephages," he said. "And they've taken the working Eroder. They've cleared us out. And they knew what they were coming for."


	12. Ambush

"_Who_ the hell, _why_ the hell, and _where_ the hell?"

Coraline, after more than a little arguing, was riding shotgun in the van and was caught up in venting her explosive anger. Wybie had the wheel, and was gingerly directing the van through largely empty streets while keeping one ear on her tirade. Maria sat behind them, drumming her fingers on the frame of the empty window repetitively and looking at the passing outside.

"Why the hell would someone take these items? These _specific items_? How would they even know what they _were_? This doesn't make any goddam sense."

"A fluke? Maybe? It's just …" started Wybie to no avail before he was cut off by the rising tide of anger from Coraline.

"They took hardly anything apart from those! That's a pretty _inconvenient_ fluke, don't you think? Who would know about them? Why the hell would they even take them? What could you do with one?"

One of her hands rested on her shotgun case, propped up against her chair, the end resting on the floor. It hadn't been disturbed from where she'd left it in the complex, but the only ammo left was that which had been left in the case. All their ferroshot had gone missing, along with every scrap of shot for Wybie and Maria's pistols.

She hated what had happened. And she hated the feeling of not being able to do anything about it. If this was Skirving's work, then he'd placed himself behind a legal barrier that would take too long for them to overcome.

Granted, they'd just broken into government offices. Legality wasn't their foremost concern. But they didn't have the first idea of what they could do about getting the Eroder and the binder back. They had no idea where they could have been taken, or why Skirving would want them.

Assuming it was even Skirving. In fact, now Coraline thought about it, he'd be at the Egg Rolling on the White House lawn today, along with most of the government.

Well, they did say it was best to let children know about monsters as soon as possible, but inflicting Skirving on them was probably going a little too far. But whatever was happening, it was indecipherable to Coraline's mind, and a feeling of futile anger stole over her.

It wasn't any fun, that kind of anger. There wasn't anything it could be properly directed at, not when the source of your troubles was as intangible as smoke. All she could do was try and turn it into questions to bounce off Wybie and Maria, for all they could know or guess.

She spat despairing venom and answerless questions, Wybie rummaged for half-guessed, half-imagined answers, and Maria kept on looking out the window. Her mind had drifted away with the finger-tapping, and she was lost in her own thoughts.

A part of Maria kept on noting the outside world as they drove, and as they turned into a street that was all but deserted, she observed that another vehicle had turned with them, keeping just behind them.

It pulled to their side, presumably to overtake them, and Maria saw that it was an electric motorcycle. The driver wore plain black-and-grey biker leathers, with their face totally obscured by a helmet. They glanced around at the van as they swerved around to its right, and Maria saw them raise their hand, presumably to gesture to Wybie.

Then some part of Maria's mind clicked, and she realised that she'd seen the bike before around the city. In fact, she'd seen it quite a few times.

In fact, she'd only started seeing it around in the last few days.

And then she realised that the biker wasn't gesturing at the van, but at something _past_ the van. And she saw the bulge of a holster at the biker's waist.

On reflex, she lunged forward from the back, throwing herself down as she dived, and grabbed at Coraline and Wybie as she did so.

"Get down!" she screamed, and before they could respond, their heads _thunk_ed together as they were abruptly pulled down.

And then the window next to Coraline exploded inwards.

* * *

><p>Coraline, even as her head pulsed with numb fireworks from where her skull had met Wybie's, still had enough presence of mind to realise that the window was shedding composite-glass shards over her in a torrent, and that a bullet whistling through had done the same to the back left window, only directing the shards out the way.<p>

It took a second for the retort of the bullet to hit her ears, by which time she glimpsed who had shot at them from outside.

A man in a balaclava and a silicon scale vest, made badly concealed by a long jacket, had stepped out from behind a parked car, and stood further down the street with a rifle trained on the van. They saw they had missed, and fired again, this time in a short burst at the middle of the van. Coraline pulled forward as hard as she could before the bullets tore through her seat, ripping chunks of upholstery out in a storm of soft edges. Maria had thrown herself to behind Wybie, and missed the spray of unstopped bullets.

The van swerved wildly as Wybie, suddenly appreciating what was going on, panicked ever so slightly.

"Drive!" screamed Coraline into his ear. She grabbed for her shotgun case, fumbling with the clasps, cursing a storm as she did, her mind too gone to shock to do anything but fight back.

The biker kept pace with the van, and kept their right hand on the bike while pulling out their pistol with their left. They held themselves awkwardly, forced to fire the waving gun past the length of their body, and their first shot produced only a loud noise and a burst of broken concrete from the road.

Their second shot smashed through Wybie's window, sending another shower of glass into the van. This whistled past the tip of Wybie's nose, just over Coraline's ducked head, and punched into another parked car.

The situation, a small part of Coraline's mind considered, was hectic enough as it was without a car alarm offering up its skirl as a backing chorus.

The rest of her mind was split between raging at the stubborn clasps on the shotgun case and keeping track of the gunman at the side of the road, whom they were now nearing at an alarming speed. He still had his weapon raised, and Coraline threw herself to the left again, as did Maria, when the next burst of bullets hit and reduced Coraline's seat to smaller shreds.

The distance between them and the gunman was shrinking rapidly even as Coraline thought. They'd been too lucky, too, too lucky so far. If he got in one accurate shot…

Goddam _clasps_.

Giving up, she grabbed the case with both hands and held it braced, one hand supporting its weight from below, the other placed at one end. She angled the other end at the window, and mentally prepared herself to go through with what was likely her stupidest plan yet.

Though it did, at least, rely on timing. And timing was always something she'd been good at.

The gunman pulled the gun, frustrated by his past failure and likewise adopting a new strategy. His gun spat out another hail of bullets, aimed at the van's front tire. Several of them hit home, and tore into the tire with the sound of rubber sheets being ripped open by a chainsaw, suddenly sending the van into another nigh-uncontrolled swerve. The gunman stepped briskly forward, his gun still raised, ready to be emptied into the slowed van at point-blank range.

He stepped right next to the window and prepared to angle his gun straight at the passenger riding shotgun, which was the exact moment at which the shotgun case was rammed right up into his jaw.

He was knocked right back, stunned and spitting blood, and collided with the parked car behind him. He sprawled to the ground in an ungainly heap, the gun clattering from his grasp to the ground, leaving him helpless to do anything except have a nice lie-down and a gurgle.

Satisfied that he was out of the fight, Coraline turned to Wybie's side, the case still in her grasp. The biker was still easily keeping pace with the van, and loosed a muffled curse when they saw their colleague knocked cold. They pulled back slightly while maintaining a steady rate of fire, the mercifully-low-powered bullets sparking off the van's roof or whistling just past the frantically flailing Wybie. Blood ran down his sleeve from where one lucky bullet had grazed his elbow.

Thinking wildly, he twisted the wheel to the left, turning the van towards the biker in a desperate attempt to ram them, who casually pulled back as the van swerved, keeping themselves a few feet away. They aimed their pistol again, and tossed it to one side when it clicked empty. They grabbed for another one at their side, their concentration slipping slightly.

With one more heave at the wheel and a sharp jab at the accelerator, Wybie drove the van right at the motorcycle's side. The driver looked up with hardly a second to spare, and threw the bike's momentum and their own weight to the right, intending to skirt the edge of the van.

Instead, what happened was that Wybie grabbed out from the window with one arm and seized the hand which held the bike's handlebars, tugging it free of its grasp with all his strength. The biker, caught off balance and bereft of a grip, flailed and fell, pitching off the side of their bike onto the sidewalk, their helmet bashing against the edge with a loud crack and a startled yell. The bike wobbled on gamely for a few feet before colliding with another parked car in a shower of metal fragments, eliciting yet another wail from its alarm.

Wybie gunned the van's accelerator for what wasn't the first time, and tore off down the street as fast as the engine would allow. Coraline looked in the rear-view mirror, checking for pursuit.

There was none, and they vanished further into the city the first chance they got, leaving the caterwauling car alarm and the gunshot echoes behind them, leaving the screech of the torn tire in their wake.

* * *

><p>"<em>What the hell was THAT?"<em>

Now it was Wybie's turn to yell.

Allowing for a few minutes for shock to kick in for Coraline, Maria, and Wybie; which manifested respectively as a completely flat tone, fervent thanks to God, and hysterical yelling, this could hardly be blamed.

"_Why were people trying to KILL US?"_

"I don't know. Let me think."

"…_tentationem. Sed libera nos a malo. Dispersit, dedit…_"

The smashed windows and bullet holes in the side had gotten more than a few funny looks, but luckily no investigation. It had been the work of a few moments, once they were on the city outskirts, to haul out the spare tire and apply a bandage to Wybie's elbow. After that, shock had gently kicked in.

"Funny. We're not used to anything other than a psychephage trying to kill us," said Coraline. "That would explain why we're a bit on edge."

"That's because I'm _used_ to psychephages trying to kill us! They're normal, it's _what they do_. Why are _people_ trying to kill us?"

"Just one thing," said Coraline, her voice still even, cutting him off as she hunted for her phone in her coat pockets. "Catch your breath. I have to … to …" Her hand stopped on something hard, and a short probing around the region revealed a bullet hole in the coat. She rummaged, and drew out a small bullet that had been fired from the biker's pistol, the tip flattened against the chainmail lining of her coat. Whatever had made it lose its momentum had saved her. Barely.

It was then that she noticed the ache that had spread itself all the way up one side, the ache of a huge bruise.

She stared at the bullet in silence for a few seconds, before dropping it carefully into her pocket. Reaching into another pocket, she unearthed the undamaged phone and called Sayid's number.

"Morning, Ms Jones," came the yawned response from his end. "I thought today wasn't a working day for…"

"Sayid, are you staying home today?"

"Um, I was just going to stay in my flat and get in some quality time with the dissertation. Why?"

"Good. Stay there. Don't answer to anyone. If someone you don't know comes asking for you, stay away from them. If they claim to be someone you know, make damn sure at a distance. If you feel in the slightest bit uneasy, call campus secu … no, the police. Call the police."

"I … what?"

"Long story. The department's being closed down. And it's been burgled."

"What?"

"And two people have just tried to kill us."

"_What?_"

"Call you later." Coraline hung up and switched off the phone.

"Is he alright?" asked Maria, breaking off from something in Latin.

"He's alright. I've told him not to talk to strangers, because that's a lesson always worth learning." Coraline reached down to touch the bullet in her pocket, and winced as the effort made the pain of her bruise flare up. Suddenly suspicious of delayed reactions, she quickly felt that side of her and was relieved to feel nothing wet.

Attempts on one's life were marvellous things. They put problems into perspective. Coraline could hardly remember what she'd been worrying about, her mind overtaken and hammered to a near-repilica of tranquillity, drawing out cold rationality from chaos.

"Could … could that have been a random attack?" asked Wybie from beside her. "I know that with what's been happening, it seems like it could have been part of whatever's going on, but … it _could_ have just been a robbery of sorts."

"No," said Maria. "The driver signalled to the gunman. That had been set up; they'd been waiting for us. It wasn't a spur-of-the-moment attack."

"That, and robberies with assault rifles are pretty thin on the ground," said Coraline dryly.

"Then we're being targeted," said Wybie. He leaned back in the seat with a sharp sigh. "We have to get out. We have to stay low."

"What?" asked Coraline.

"If they're trying to kill us, whoever's planning this, then they're not fooling around. I don't … I just don't want to see you hurt, or killed. Either of you hurt over this. They're playing for keeps. We have to keep our heads down."

There was a moment's silence. Then Coraline said "If they're taking things that far, then they're planning something big, like you said. Something serious." She got no answer, and continued. "Serious enough to be stopped."

"And I agree, but how? We don't even know who they are, or what they're planning, or why anything. All we know is what they're capable of. And we probably don't even know the full extent of that."

"They wanted to kill us," said Coraline. "They failed. They don't know what _we're_ capable of, either."

"Look at us, look at us right now. What are we capable of?"

"_Anything_, for god's sake." Coraline's eyes flared. "We're a mad scientist, an obsessive detective, and a gunslinger with anger management issues, and between us we probably constitute a whole sane person. We fight the hell out of problems all the time. That's our job. We've gone in blind before. We've been ambushed, we've been caught off guard, we've won by the skin of our teeth more times than not. And that hasn't stopped us."

"At least we had …" started Wybie before he was furiously cut off.

"Whoever planned that, they wanted us out of the picture. I'm not giving them what they want. Protecting us isn't the issue. Who the hell's going to protect _them_?"

Wybie didn't answer at once, keeping his gaze forward and on the road. "I want the Eroder back. I can't replicate it with what we had left," he said reluctantly, and at length. "But it's no use talking like this if we still know nothing about who we're fighting."

"We know some things," said Maria quietly, and the other two turned, interested. She continued. "We know that they've got the resources to send hitmen after us. And we know that they know about us…"

"Yeah, that's kind of a given…" started Coraline, but found it her turn to be sharply cut off.

"No, _listen_. Narrow the scope. Who knows about us? And this'll probably be something they've hidden, but who could be so invested in us? No, narrow it down further. Who _could_ know? Who could know about the binder and the Eroder and our success with Tripod?"

"Well…" Wybie frowned as he thought. "You … you'd have to be a part of the department … or you could apply pressure on someone in the department … or you could have some sort of unnoticed surveillance…"

"Son of a _bitch_, the _spy_," said Coraline. "They put it there. That was their work."

"But we saw that. We got rid of it," said Wybie.

"And I'll bet you several of my vitalmost organs that they had a feed to the spy that let them know if it had been deactivated. And I'll bet the rest that they put another one right in as soon as they could."

"But when would they have had the chance? They'd have had to have a chance to slip it inside the building."

"So," said Maria, kneading her chin with her knuckles, "Someone who would have access to that kind of equipment. Someone who knows about our work and has taken an interest in it, unobtrusively or otherwise. Someone who has the resources to send assassins. Someone who had access to the building after we'd deactivated …"

"_Double_ son of a bitch," said Coraline, realising before Maria had finished speaking.

"What? Do you think you know who it is?" said Maria, looking up.

"Triple son of a bitch with cherries on top. Yes, yes I do."

"Then who is it?" asked Wybie.

Coraline said, and explained as calmly as she could.

Maria nearly swore, and Wybie nearly steered the van into a lamppost.

"That makes sense, and _screw it_ for making sense," he said, once he had calmed down. "I offered the bastard _coffee_."

"He fits," said Maria. "But now what do we do? Like Wybie was getting at, what _can_ we do?"

"I'll tell you what we can do," said Coraline, her fury masked by the same simmering calmness. "We're going to drive up to him. And we're going to knock on his front door, get invited in, and we'll have a civilised discussion."

"You know what I've always liked about us? We can always tell when the other one is joking," said Wybie.

A moment passed, expectant and awkward. Past the van, the city was alive, more so than usual. People were celebrating Easter and April Fool's Day alike, rolling eggs in their lawns on in their homes, filling some streets and more than a few city parks. In the distance, too far to be discerned from the van, the White House rose amongst a celebrating throng, the wide green expanse of the Ellipse running around it.

"You are joking, right?"

"Hand over the wheel, Why-Were-You-Born."

* * *

><p>Even in built-up states like Maryland, a few secluded, wild areas remained. Some of them existed by chance, ignored by human expansion and thus far undisturbed. And others yet had been created by choice, acts of preservation for preservation's sake, or for recreation, or for keeping things relatively concealed.<p>

One of those relatively concealed things was a military base in the southern part of the state that no-one really knew about, or much cared about if they did. It was relatively small and non-descript, staffed by a small garrison and only really acting as an elaborate token of security for the office-holder who had cause to work there.

The sun was high and bright in the sky by the time the battered van pulled up before the base's steel gates, and cast deep shadows in the ground from the rising structures.

"Coraline Jones, Department of the Supernatural," said Coraline, leaning out of the car and offering up her ID card to the perplexed young soldier on duty. "We're here to see the current occupant."

"Uh," he said by way of elaborate response, looking hesitantly over the card. He knew little about the Department of the Supernatural, save that it existed and was staffed by a bunch of goofballs, and knew littler about the recent political manoeuvring in Washington. The protocol of this escaped him as well, so he settled on some sort of compromise.

"I can phone ahead," he said, handing the card back. "You folks can get out of the van and come past the gate. It's alarmed, so watch out."

They got out the van, Coraline annoyed at having to leave the shotgun, and trundled on past the security gate. Wybie and Maria passed without incident, but the gate chirped at Coraline, drawing a suspicious look from the guards at the entrance.

Coraline paused, checked around herself, and realised the problem and shrugged off her chainmail-lined trenchcoat (with mixed feelings; she disliked losing the protection, but there was such a thing as _too_ sunny a day). She stepped past, holding the coat behind her, and the rest of her brought no alarm from the gate.

"He's invited you all on up into the main building," said the young soldier, putting down the phone. "I'll take your coat, ma'am."

"How gentlemanly," said Coraline, handing it over and smirking as his eyes bulged with shock. "Keep it safe and sound."

They were directed up into the main building, a concrete-and-steel block that rose for a few stories up, the roof flat and supporting a black gunship. Wybie glanced up at it, and then lost sight of it as they entered the building.

They walked up several flights of stairs in a maze of corridors lined with small doors, nodded at every so often by soldiers. Eventually they found the office they needed, and Maria knocked. A voice invited them in, and they entered, Maria at the centre, flanked by Coraline and Wybie. They nodded briefly to each other before opening the door.

The room they entered was a wide and open office, flanked by unadornished shelves and towers of drawers, with two powerfully-built and heavily-armed guards standing by the entrance. Before them, a long wooden desk sat in the room's centre, behind which a man sat. Behind him in turn, several boxes sat stacked below a shuttered window.

He looked up as they entered, and stood, as if to greet them. They closed the door behind them.

"This is an unexpected visit, Ms…" he started, his hand dipping briefly to something at his side.

They didn't give him time to finish before acting.

In one smooth movement, born of endless practising and sparring, Coraline swept around to the guard at her side and shoved her hand up at his neck, driving her fingers into a key pressure point and heaving him backwards into the wall. Several brief seconds of pressure were all it took for the off-guard guard to lose consciousness; he slumped to the floor before he had even properly registered what had happened. Coraline reached out with her other hand and snagged the pistol from the holster on his belt, flipping it back to Maria who caught it almost by chance.

Wybie lacked Coraline's skill, but made up for it with sheer strength and power. He simply turned and punched out the guard on his side, catching him between the chinstrap and the base of his helmet. The guard fell like a rock.

The man behind the desk almost finished the move towards his own weapon, but there was an audible click and a hissed "_No,_" from Maria's weapon and Maria herself. He paused, and slowly let his hands fall to his side.

There was a brief moment as Coraline made sure her guard subsided to the ground with as little noise as possible. She stooped to pick up his rifle, and turned to face the man behind the desk.

James Malinois, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, regarded the three with a blank, impassive gaze.

"Mr Malinois," said Coraline, between gritted teeth, "We need to have a talk."


	13. Escapade

Malinois's gaze shifted from Coraline's, to Wybie and Maria, to the barrels of the rifle and pistol aimed at him, and to the two recumbent guards. Then he sighed and stepped back from the desk. His expression was composed, calculating.

"I would have preferred to avoid this," he said. "I knew that you were still alive, but I had hoped that you'd decided to stay low. In the worst case, I'd hoped that your suspicion would fall elsewhere. Onto Skirving, or onto the Iranian in your department."

"I'm happy to disappoint," said Coraline. "Skirving's got all the grace and fair-mindedness of a sociopathic vulture, but he does things by the book, he's a stickler for proper order. I know that, and I can respect that if nothing else. And Sayid doesn't have a shred of guile in him. And why does him being an Iranian-American matter in the slightest?"

She stood across the desk from Malinois, directly facing him, the rifle levelled at his chest.

"Now, in order, please explain why you sent hired guns after us, and why you took equipment from our department."

"I think you appreciate what they were there to do. The hired guns were my own men. I trusted them to get the job done…"

"For all that they shot like stormtroopers?" interjected Wybie.

"…but I underestimated you," said Malinois, pressing on. "That happens quite often to your department, doesn't it?"

"Not from the people who actually matter," retorted Coraline, keeping her gun steady. "Sit down. Keep your hands where I can see them. Make any move or noise which we don't want you to, and I'll shot to hurt first, and then kill. You have some explaining to do, you bastard."

"Don't we all, in the end," muttered Malinois, sitting down slowly in the chair, keeping his arms on the rests.

"Wybie, make sure the door's locked. Maria, keep an eye on the window. Have that pistol ready in case Mr Malinois gets any adventurous ideas."

The two moved to their positions. Malinois looked up to meet Coraline's gaze frankly and levelly, his expression earnest, his body leaned forward.

"Whatever you think I've done, I did it for the country's good," he said. "None of it was personal. All of it I take on my own conscience as a necessary evil. But at the moment, I don't…"

Coraline jabbed forward with the tip of the gun and struck Malinois in the solar plexus, knocking him back into his chair and eliciting a startled release of breath.

"No, Mr Malinois, that's not how this is going to work," said Coraline, her icy tones dancing around the edge of explosive anger. "You've lied to us. You've stolen from us. And you've just confessed to ordering the proxy killings of me and my friends. Answer the questions we give you in full. Leave out no details. And keep whatever shit you've cooked up as justification to yourself unless we ask for it. Are we clear?"

"Crystal," said Malinois, rubbing at his chest.

Coraline paused to run through what they'd devised in her head, making sure she had them in order, before speaking.

"You've been following our department for a while now. Since before you became the Director of Homeland of Security, probably while you were something senior in the CIA. And you've been keeping active surveillance on us for how long?"

"Two months," said Malinois. "Just after my predecessor's untimely death, and just before the President first nominated me for the position of secretary."

"You've been using the spy-bugs to keep up that surveillance."

"I had and still have huge powers of requisition. Those items are expensive and potent. I had more than a few awkward hoops to jump through when you destroyed one, though not nearly so many acquiring a second one. Skirving took me at my word when I reported none had gone missing." Malinois permitted himself a small smile. "Which was the honest truth. I could account for all of them."

"And what were you recording?"

"Your lab-work, for the most part. Your experiments, your observations, your machines." Malinois was still calm. Eerily calm.

"I guess you came by on Friday to drop off the second one?" said Wybie, his tone nowhere near as controlled as Coraline's. He loomed over Malinois.

"I got that one ahead of time, in case my first ran afoul of a Sur-real field. But I didn't just meet you to drop it discreetly in your lab while your back was turned. I wanted to check my knowledge first-hand, as it were."

"So you knew what we'd been doing for two months," said Coraline, suppressing a shudder at the thought. "And you knew that we'd made a functioning Eroder last night. And you pushed our termination through committee and took our Eroder and Wybie's notes during the night." Coraline breathed out. Then she said, "This is the part where you explain _why the hell_ you did that."

Malinois hesitated before answering.

"Because I want the power to make changes. And your department's findings can help me do that."

"Connect those dots, if you'd be so good," said Maria, confused. Malinois did so.

* * *

><p>"When I first heard about your department, when I was still rising in the CIA, I wrote you off as a crowd of frauds, like pretty much everyone else. But I was struck by morbid curiosity, so I actually did some research into you. I wanted to have a laugh about how stoned out of his mind President Durant must have been to have created you."<p>

"When I did that research, however, I pulled up a lot of interesting files. Like the case in Chicago. And that incident at your high school, during your prom. Things for which no rational explanation had been offered which convinced me. I did more research, accessed more old files, pulled up some of the classified details on your department. I was quite obsessed for a while." Malinois smirked at his own memory. "But it all paid off in the end. And I was convinced. Your department was actually doing legitimate work."

"Stop, you're flattering us," said Wybie, completely deadpan.

"You should be flattered. I mean, look at the things you've done. You've singlehandedly surveyed an entire other field of reality, contained its incursions, and protected people from it on a daily basis for the last _four years_. Do you have any idea of the implications of what you've found? Of the dynamics, of the revelations for science, for culture, for understanding? Of the _potential?_" That last word was delivered in so fierce a tone that Wybie took a cautious step back. As he stepped back, his gaze fell upon the boxes stacked against the wall, and his brow furrowed.

"So you wanted what we knew," said Coraline cautiously as Wybie stepped forward to have a rummage among the boxes. "And you were prepared to kill us to get it."

"What I have planned doesn't need a third party like you interfering, who know of the elements involved. I wasn't prepared to gamble it all to net your support, and I needed you removed if it was to have a chance of succeeding."

"So let's get to that million-dollar question. _What_ were you planning?" Coraline's anger had simmered, and was now almost gone in favour of plain mystification.

Malinois shifted in his chair.

"Look at the world," he said. "Look at the times we live in. We're weakening, ailing even as we deny it. The Sub-Continental War bled us out, and bred a whole new nest of enemies abroad. American bases are now open targets for anyone with a grudge, Iran and China are picking at our power like vultures. The world isn't _safe_ for American citizens or American ideals."

"What the _hell_ does this have to do with…" started Coraline.

"And our President does _nothing!_" snapped Malinois. "Kuciyela sits and dithers and fusses over the country's petty affairs while the doves in his cabinet and Congress whisper lies to him to get him to sit where he is. We need a new leader. One who'll take advice, one who'll practise a new kind of leadership, where we assert our dominance. And if we have to do that at the point of a gun, then let the world tremble."

"And how's _our_ research possibly going to bring about this cheery scenario?"

"Because of what it'll let me do," said Malinois. "I've sought out the old areas mentioned in your research and discussions, you know that? I've made my own investigations. And in Mexico, I made contact with a psychephage."

The drop of a pin could have been heard in the room at that moment.

"And with your Eroder, I'll be able to access its power," said Malinois. "With your Eroder, I'll be able to summon it."

"As _what_?" said Coraline, stunned by the train of thought embarked upon by Malinois. "For information? As a bargaining chip? As a weapon?"

"As a partner in a deal," said Malinois. "I have given it … certain considerations. In return, it will perform a service as soon as I give it the ability."

The silence that followed was broken first by Wybie.

"What psychephage?"

Malinois slowly raised his hands to his suit jacket and unbuttoned the front, revealing the shirt underneath. His deft fingers undid the top buttons for that one in turn, revealing enough of what lay beneath.

Three bright feathers had been bonded into the skin of Malinois's chest, falling like fronds from three nodes of skin, small trickles of blood etched into the white shafts. They gleamed red, blue, green, and burned white where the vane caught the light.

Coraline nearly jumped backwards.

"You stupid son of a bitch," she said, shocked beyond eloquency. "You signed your soul over to a goddam _coatl_?"

* * *

><p>Coatls.<p>

Ambition-eaters. Great serpents of plumage and raw, deep-running avarice. Ancient and cruel. Powerful compared to nearly all other psychephages.

Coraline had only encountered one once before, and that by accident, and it had been small and under-nourished, and she had been lucky to be the one left standing at the end of it all.

And the man in front of her had struck a deal with one, and bore its token item.

"You utter … It gets your soul," she said, numbly, still dumbfounded. "What does it do in return?"

Malinois, buttoning up his shirt and jacket, essayed one glance at the clock on the wall behind Coraline.

"At the moment," he said, quite casually, "The president is on the Ellipse, with all his cabinet and all the city's schoolchildren. There'll be noise, confusion, media, a lot of attention on the one spot. And your Eroder has been set up there, and its area has been expanded to cover the entire lawn."

"The coatl will come from the Sur-real, while the Eroder has been made active. It will strike at the president, and cause additional collateral damage and no small amount of carnage for as long as it can, and then it will withdraw."

"The country will be left shocked, leaderless, divided, under the command of -" He coughed dismissively. "-Holloway. And he will beg me for advice. The whole _country_ will beg me for advice. Only I'll know how to deal with the situation. Only I'll have the new president's ear. And I can do as I please, as benefits America." His eyes gleamed. "I can solve all our problems, and all it'll cost the nation will be one man and whoever gets in the coatl's way."

"You…" said Coraline, the first to attempt speech, "You … you're cracked, you realise that? Something has to be broken in your damn head to have come up with any of this. To have tried carrying it through."

"There'll be children on the Ellipse," said Wybie, in soft tones. "_Children_, you _bastard_."

"A hard sacrifice," said Malinois. "Collateral damage brings me no pleasure. But it'll be a small evil for a greater good, and I take the costs upon my own soul."

"You won't," hissed Maria. "You've already traded it away."

"For god's sake!" hissed Malinois. "Can't you see what this'll do beyond the short-term? Let them die, so long as future children need not. I told you all this so you'd know why this was being done. So you'd lend me your support. Look at the repercussions. Look at what I'll be able to do_. I will make a better world_."

Wybie spat in disgust, and opened one of the remaining boxes on the floor. His eyes widened, and he drew out the binder with all his notes, supporting it in the crook of an arm as if cradling a baby. With his other hand, he opened the last box and blinked at what he saw. A gun rested inside the box, flanked by boxes of ammo. It was an automatic shotgun, sleek and deadly, polished to a high sheen and tipped with a bayonet of curved iron.

Malinois followed his gaze.

"I'm counting on the coatl returning in person to collect my soul. I was in the forces," he said with a dismissive look at Wybie. "I know how to defend myself. I will have to convince it to delay my part of the deal. The rounds are made of iron, as pure as is available."

"Coraline, it's your birthday come early," said Wybie, kicking the box over to her.

"This'll come in handy," she said, keeping the rifle levelled on Malinois with one hand while reaching to pick up the box and support it under one arm. She gave the Secretary a look carved from ice.

"You know something, Mr Malinois?" she said. "When I was young, about the same age as most of the children we save on a daily basis, as you mentioned, I learned a lesson."

"I know what you've …" Malinois started to say, but was silenced by the rifle's tip leaning into his chest again.

"You see," she continued, motioning for Malinois to stand up, which he did so with some confusion. "I always dreamed of finding a better world. And when I found what I thought was one, I couldn't think of anything else. But I poked at that world just a little bit, and what I found revealed how rotten it was. And I learned that if I wanted a better world, I'd have to go out there and _make it myself_. With my own effort, my own sweat and tears, my own drive to make the world right. And I've worked hard on it ever since, and I've learned a couple of things along the way, and one of those things, Mr Malinois, is that you don't make a better world by murdering children. And if you want to make your own world based on that, then you and I are working at what we call _cross-purposes_."

Malinois gave her the bemused, blank look of someone lost to their own ideas, unable to fathom why they weren't being supported, incapable of seeing how they were wrong. Coraline turned away from him in disgust.

She nodded to Maria. "Take him with us. Keep him in front. Use him as a shield."

"Where are we taking him?" asked Wybie. "To the van? We'll be surrounded outside."

"Outside, yes. But not to the van."

"Where else is there to go?"

"Up."

* * *

><p>"Good afternoon, everyone," called Wybie, opening the door, one of his arms pinning Malinois's wrists behind his back, the other pressing Maria's pistol against the man's head. "Hey there. We're just passing through. Put those guns down for a second, and we'll get along <em>brilliantly<em>."

A short staircase had led up to the door, which opened onto the flat rooftop. Several soldiers stood in disorganised clumps, and turned and started with alarm when they saw their commander being held as a hostage.

Behind them, the gunship lay at rest.

"Forward, forward," muttered Wybie, shuffling forward with Malinois while the soldiers slowly put down their weapons. Few of them were veterans, none of them knew how to respond. Ignorance in other people could be a blessing. Malinois opened his mouth as if to speak, and Wybie tapped the pistol's tip against the side of his head as a friendly warning.

Maria followed up the stairs just behind him, holding the assault rifle uncertainly, glancing behind her to see Coraline following, brandishing the fully loaded shotgun. She glanced around once before closing the door behind her, shutting it on the other soldiers they'd encountered while moving up and who had been too uncertain to do much apart from follow at a distance.

One of the soldiers recovered sufficiently to raise his gun and shout "Halt right there!"

"No," Wybie retorted cheerfully, which nonplussed the soldier enough to make him lower the gun uncertainly.

"Straight to the gunship," said Coraline. "Before one of them loses control."

Their progress was slow, reduced to the level of Malinois's awkward bound shuffle. Wybie stopped just as they reached the open gunship, and turned to face the rooftop. Maria climbed in first, and Coraline heaved herself up just after her. She motioned, and trained the shotgun on Malinois as Wybie shoved him into the gunship. She caught him by the neck, calling out "No moves, or he dies," to the soldiers before letting Wybie climb into the now-tight compartment. After a belated minute, an alarm started to sound from the base below.

"Into the pilot's seat," she said to Maria. "Work this thing as best you can." Maris did so, with a look of no little consternation.

"For the love of your country," hissed Malinois. "Stop this. You don't know what you're going to disrupt."

"I'm going to disrupt a man plotting to kill innocents for his own ends. I'm going to stop a psychephage. I know exactly how to do my job, Mr Malinois. Did you forget?" answered Coraline.

There came a rattling noise from the gunship's engines as one triggered button by Maria fired them to life. The rotor above began to turn, gathering momentum, throbbing through the air as the gunship began to wobble slightly. Another exploration of a lever suddenly made it lift a few feet into the air, making Wybie nearly lurch and grab at something, and a jab at something important-looking produced an extra roar of power from the engines.

"One more question," said Coraline as they lifted. "The windows for this are bulletproof, I take it?"

"Yes. What of it?" said Malinois.

"Then you've stopped being useful," said Coraline simply, and gave him a hard shove out the open compartment, ducking back as she did so. Malinois fell several metres with a startled cry, and hit the roof ankle-first with a blazing curse. The same soldier from before dived forwards to help him, while several others pulled out small arms and opened fire, the shots clashing off the armour and glass with the sound of striking steel hail.

"What," said Wybie as the gunship continued to peel away and the shots hitting off it diminished, as the rush of air filled the compartment and the noise of the rotor and engines vied for dominance with the fading voices from the ground, "What, what, what, _what_ the hell did we just do? Why do you keep finding new and exciting ways to put my life in peril? What are we even doing?"

"We just stole a federal gunship, becasue it's funny, and we're finding your Eroder before the coatl can arrive. And if we're too late for that, then we're taking it out the old-fashioned way." Coraline looked out, at the expanse of blue sky and at the rustling green sea below them. "What have we got?"

"This useless pistol, the equally useless assault rifle, a gunship … without any outfitted weapons by the looks of it, so that's no use, your shotgun with ferroshot, and each other. In order."

"What order would that be?"

"If I have to say it out loud, then it'll just sound cheesy. And once that happens, this entire scenario will just become entirely silly."

"Did you have any other plans for your Monday, anyway?" Coraline took his hand, and grasped it as tightly as she could. "Let's give people something to talk about."

"Guys?" said Maria. "Slightly important question. _How do you actually pilot this thing?_"


	14. Stormcrow

Just to the north of the White House, facing the building up the length of the South Lawn, sat the seven-acre spread of the Ellipse.

It was a large and open place, an elliptical expanse of thick grass circled by large specimen trees and dotted here and there with commerative statues. At the moment, it was a riot of colour and boisterous energy, as hordes of children, half-hearted attempts at corralling them made by teachers and parents, ran and chased one another and swung from statue arms, with other groups of dozens at a time rolling painted eggs and smearing themselves sticky with chocolate. A large marquee of multihued cloth sat near the centre.

Secret service agents prowled here and there, ill at ease amongst the chaos. Several cabinet members and members of the government put on their best smiles and did their best to interact with members of the public who couldn't give the slightest damn about economics statistics.

The same tumult extended up onto the South Lawn, down which Kuciyela strolled, accompanied by two towering agents and Skirving. Who was the most intimidating wasn't an easily resolved question.

"It doesn't actually hurt to smile, Malcolm," said Kuciyela gently, in a teasing tone to an old friend. "You might like it if you try it."

"Bah. You were the one who ran to be President. You're the one who's obliged to smile, and you've got other people to do additional smiling for you. I'm your Chief of Staff, and I'll be as cantankerous as I please."

"And it pleases you a great deal."

"Oh, for a cane, so I could wave it at these brats and yell at them to get off the lawn."

"Try. For me?"

Skirving's face then could have frozen magma. Then, as if trying to recall movements he'd once read about in a book, he twitched the tips of his lips upwards and bared his teeth awkwardly. Several children ran screaming. Magma would have developed into long-chained proteins, undergone abiogenesis, and evolved to have done likewise.

"Please stop smiling, Malcolm."

"With pleasure." Skirving's face returned relievedly to its customary expression of frosty contempt for everything. "The media's come out in force."

This last comment was addressed in the direction of a knot of reporters, who stood next to the trees to their left as the two men entered the Ellipse. One of the agents muttered the update into an earpiece.

Several cameras were already up and running, with people standing in front of them with microphones and stating the transparently obvious. Equipment and bags lay slumped against the tree trunks, piled in a ramshackle manner.

Underneath one of these piles, which had been there from the beginning of the day, something purred away to itself. The faint buzz of energy came from it, and the air whispered faintly. Unseen wires extended from either side, running along and under the ground in places and carrying a current along a great perimeter.

And through these wires, unseen energies seeped into the air. And past these energies like a veil, an unseen shape stirred.

* * *

><p>"It's nice to get days like this," said Kuciyela. "Days where you can put aside concerns and just … enjoy the sun. When you know what you're going to get from the day."<p>

"Hasn't government taught you anything? If something out there can ruin your day, it inevitably will."

"We've got a lid on all the ongoing situations, we're currently in the clear for security compromises, and I have nothing else on my plate except for reading a picture book to kids. Kindly desist with those cynical snorts."

"Must you deny me all my pleasures?"

"Hmm." Kuciyela smiled, then sniffed at the air. He frowned.

"How strange."

"What?" The men were nearing the Ellipse's centre.

"Can you smell honeysuckle?"

"No, I…" Skirving stopped, and smelled the air. "Now that you mention it, yes." He wrinkled his nose. "It's a little overpowering."

"Is it something…" started Kuciyela, and stopped when he noticed others starting to notice the smell. Children were looking around with perplexed expressions and wrinkled noses, as were their teachers and parents and more than a few of the agents. There were few comments, but the air was thickening with tension and puzzlement.

And when Kuciyela moved his hand, there seemed to be almost a charge to the air, a potentiality seeping in, a sense that he struggled to find words for.

He tried to brush it off, and turned to Skirving. "Can you…"

A scream cut him off. A child had fallen to their knees several feet away from him, and waved a wild hand at the air while clasping the other to an ear and screaming "It's not right! _It's not right!_" Fearful murmurs and chatters of unease were running through the crowd, and those of the press who weren't joining in were looking around, as if lost for direction. One of the cameras was starting to gently emit smoke.

"Sir," said one of the agents behind Kuciyela, retaining enough presence of mind to pretend calmness. "I think we ought to get you…"

Then a sharp peal of unsound tore through his words and the sounds of the Ellipse, a deafening peal of unnatural silence that tore away voices and left a wave of terrified stammers and interjections in its wake. The fear and disquiet in the air was now palpable, and people were already trying to edge out of the Ellipse.

Inasmuch as the source of the sudden burst of silence could be determined, Kuciyela turned to face it.

His face paled, and he stepped backwards.

A rift of light was tearing itself out of strands of suddenly illuminating light in the air, peeling open in a ragged gash that spilled light as cold and terrible as driven snow. Whispers ran through the air in rivers, soft susurrations that seemed to whip around people's feet and push them gently backwards. The rift grew incrementally but with gathering force, broad slashes flowing out from the sides and expanding the light.

In seconds, the rift had grown from a trembling line in the air to something in the rough shape of a rectangle, the edges ragged with tendrils of the encroaching cold light, which shed no luminescence and shrugged off shadows.

It stopped growing suddenly, with a soft chime that diminished the whispers. The rectangle hung in mid-air, ten feet above the ground, directly facing Kuciyela.

Then the front opened as if hinged on one side, a doorway to nothing material, and the whispers redoubled as a shape slid out.

The first thing to slide out was a massive head, long and sharp, still obscured by the cold light of the Sur-real, which shed off it in flakes as it emerged. A thick, sinuous body followed it, weaving gently in long, slow, S-shapes, pushing it through the air with implacable force and control. Kuciyela took another step backwards, but like the countless others there, his mind was too transfixed to push him back. The few screams went unnoticed.

Light fell off it like shed flakes of skin as the full extent of the figure emerged from the door, closing it noiselessly behind them. Piece by piece, the figure emerged, gently gliding to the ground before Kuciyela and coiling, rearing above him to a towering extent.

It easily exceeded fifty feet from tail-tip to snout, and twenty of those feet loomed over the President. The body was serpentine, long and limbless, rippling with powerful muscle and as thick as a car all around. Tight, hard feathers covered the form like scales, gleaming a thousand vibrant shades of crimson, azure, emerald. Rising towards the head, a crest of longer feathers emerged, coming to sharp points. The python-esque head was massive and powerful, the same muscle that ran up the body running up the neck. The mouth sharpened slightly at the tip like the beak of an eagle, two long fangs gently curving down from the upper jaw.

The eyes of the coatl were the most terrible part. They were huge and high-set, gleaming like deep pools of molten gold set with jet at the centre. They swam with detached arrogance, with the self-assured knowledge of power, with pride beyond reckoning. They held the crowd mesmerised, rooting them in place with the alien and awe-inspiring power of the Sur-real.

The coatl scanned the assembly with a detached and lazy contempt, craning its head down slightly to regard Kuciyela, who stood tiny beside it. Some neuron of self-preservation forced his legs to take him another trembling step backwards, but too many of the crowd stood frozen.

A tiny and distant drone, like the steady rapping of a ruler on a desktop, went unnoticed.

The coatl, looking back up at the crowd dragged out the silence, seeming to savour it. Then it spoke, in mellifluous and archaic speech, in a tone that could have been produced by a volcano.

"Is such all that humanity can muster?" The tone coloured with derisive amusement. "Squalling infants, paralysed soldiery, the foolish fettered and ignorant. I profess myself underwhelmed."

Its gaze fell again, to the frozen Kuciyela, the target of the bulk of its power.

"Little creature of flesh and blood," it purred, in a rolling tone that seemed to shake the earth, "Sovereign of a patchwork nation of costermongers and thieves. Thy life has been bartered. Thy person, thy self, thy _soul_ hath been made forfeit."

It rose gently back in the air, the muscles on its neck tensing as it prepared to strike down.

Whatever spell the Sur-real had wrought was dispelled.

Screaming and running followed from those who had recovered enough of their selves, and screaming and standing still from those who had not. Agents began frantically trying to herd out children and adults alike, Kuciyela took a few more steps back, and the agents to either side of him stepped forward, their guns drawn, their faces unreadable past their sunglasses, and Skirving spread his arms to either side and stepped to his left, putting himself between the coatl and a paralysed group of screaming children.

The head blurred down, faster than the eye could see, one gleaming fang slashing through the chest of one of the agents, who pitched to one side, gasping wetly and loosing a piteous, thin, choking scream. The head struck to one side with the force of a battering ram, ploughing into the other agent with the sickening sound of cracking bone and folding him up in the air as he was sent spinning through the air, limp as a rag doll. The attacks moved with a horrific, swift energy, almost casual on the coatl's part.

The distant drone grew in volume, to the steady _thwack-thwack_ of a jackhammer.

The coatl smoothly jabbed forward, the tip of the snout hammering into Kuciyela and knocking him over backwards to the ground. He lay on his back, the breath driven out of him, and struggled to get to his feet as the great head drifted towards him, the eyes dancing with arrogant satisfaction.

"Beg, as it please thee," rumbled the monster, enjoying the pretence at conviviality. "Thou canst do little else."

Its fangs gleamed as the head bowed down, the mouth slowly peeling back from the edges, the tip of a forked tongue as dark as blood flickering at the tip. A low hiss came from the depths of its throat, a hiss undercut with something else …

…Something like rhythmic thunder.

Then another sound rang out, a sharp series of cracks that was quickly followed by one, two, three rounds snapping into the coatl's drawn-back head, the rounds glancing off it to no effect. The creature hissed with shock, and instantly span in the direction of the shots, as did Kuciyela from his position on the ground.

From the treeline to the west rose a black shape, a dark gunship that cut just above the trees, cutting through and sending a few dislodged leaves fluttering to the ground. It was skewed on its horizontal axis, and wobbled slightly in its flight, the engines roaring in protest at the skewed flying pattern. From one side, a figure leaned out, aiming a rifle.

And from the gunship came a familiar voice, magnified a hundred-fold.

"COATL! THIS IS THE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE SUPERNATURAL! STAND DOWN OR WE SHALL USE LETHAL FORCE!"

The coatl looked as nonplussed by the apparition of the gunship as anyone else, and Kuciyela took advantage of its distraction to edge backwards, furiously motioning others to back off as well. The coatl twisted with its entire body, its eyes narrowing and boring like blades into the gunship. The skin around its mouth peeled back further, revealing rows of shark-like teeth in addition to the massive fangs. It hissed again, a low, guttural, angry sound. "Who offers challenge?"

"Fire again, Wybie," said Coraline, standing just inside the gunship, her hand tight around the shotgun. Wybie threw off a jaunty salute and aimed down the rifle.

* * *

><p>A crash–course can be a magnificent learning tool. Especially when the situation and subject makes it a distressingly literal proposition.<p>

Luckily, Maria had some past experience in helicopter flight, the controls were friendly, and Lady Luck had a soft spot for anything that would normally be doomed to explosive failure.

A (relatively) straight flight south had returned them to the city in just less than an hour, the gunship's engines making good time over the landscape of forests and road lines, over the farmland and power sections. The journey had been a cramped one, with Wybie and Coraline sharing the compartment with unopened boxes and fixtures and coiled lengths of high-density tether-cord.

The plan had been for them to land on the Ellipse (landing the gunship would have had to have been learned as they went, but needs must) and find and remove the Eroder. Explanations could have been made later.

But as just as the White House came in view, the smell of honeysuckle filtered through to the compartment, and Coraline bit down a curse.

"It's already active," she said. "Hells take it, the coatl's already coming through."

"Plan B, then. Which was…?" said Maria distractedly, doing her damndest to split her attention between piloting the gunship and listening to the conversation.

"Violence." Coraline looked out the front window, and saw a sinuous shape of pure light slither out of a point above the wide green lawn, and saw the crowd standing frozen. "There's too many people to risk close-quarters fire . I'm going to have to be careful with this," she said, holding up the shotgun. "If we can get it away from them…"

"On it," said Wybie, realising what she was getting at and jerking at the handle for the side-door. He heaved it open, and air rushed in.

"Keep us in the air," said Coraline to Maria. "Keep us moving. And when it goes for us, peel away from it, but stay within the perimeter of the Ellipse if you can."

"One of these days, I'm going to demand a pay rise, and I'm going to thoroughly deserve it," said Maria, gritting her teeth and steadying the gunship in the air.

Wybie's first shots rang out at the coatl, which turned to face the gunship with the air of a hunter affronted by a distraction and made inquiries as to whom had done such a thing.

"Fire again, Wybie," said Coraline, and Wybie did so. The bullet clashed off the coatl's form in a spray of sparks from the bullet's casing. Coraline jabbed at the button for the loudhailer again.

"ONLY COWARDS ATTACK THE DEFENCELESS! ARE YOU TOO AFRAID TO FACE US, COATL?"

If there was one thing that went hand-in-hand with ambition, it was pride. The coatl's eyes flashed, and it twisted itself from the ground, uncoiling like rope given will.

"The lesser kin speak of such a voice," it mused in a slow murmur. "The Stormcrow, a demon of humanity clad in iron and fire. Let them tremble. I shall not."

"Start climbing," muttered Coraline to Maria, checking the shotgun. "Take us up high. It'll follow us."

Maria stabbed at the controls, keeping one hand on a lever stick as she pulled the gunship sharply upwards. Wybie stepped back briskly from the edge as the gunship began to rise, the angle of its ascent sharpening quickly. The coatl, regarding them, hissed and almost seemed to slither into the air, undulating through the air towards the gunship in swift sidewinding motions, gathering speed as it went.

"The plan's working without a hitch," observed Wybie, leaning out from the open side, the air blowing through his air as he watched the diminishing ground and the accelerating coatl. "Now it's trying to kill _us_. What now?"

"Now you step back," said Coraline, as she moved to the side with the shotgun. "I'll give it a taste of iron."

Wybie dutifully stepped back as Coraline took his place, trying to keep her footing steady in the hurtling motion of the gunship. They swept through the air, their flight erratic as Maria tried to keep control of the gunship at this speed, in this wild air. Coraline looked back along the gunship, aiming down the shotgun's length at their hunter.

God's sake, they were a distance above the ground by now. The White House looked like a model, the people on the Ellipse like ants, and the coatl…

…the coatl looked like this incredibly fast-moving _thing_ that was rapidly filling the view just behind the gunship, which was where the simile broke down but didn't stop being valid. It was huge, and it was powerful, and its eyes blazed hotter than its gleaming jaws, which were spread open and glistening and aimed right at the tail of the gunship…

It rose sharply in the air, putting extra power into its movement to put it on the same horizontal plane as the gunship, and Coraline leaned far out and craned to get a clear shot. She hammered the trigger, and the ferroshot sprayed white-hot as it rocketed from the shotgun's nozzle and raced towards the coatl. Some of it struck along the side of the creature's neck, scoring blazing lines down it and producing a sound of mixed fury and startled pain from the coatl.

Whatever it had been expecting, it hadn't been expecting iron.

But its eyes continued to blaze, and it continued to pursue the gunship.

"Think'st thou that ferromancery shall scare me away, Stormcrow?" it thundered. "Thou think th…"

Coraline caught it mid-Thou with another round of ferroshot, which the coatl barely anticipated and dodged, rolling away swiftly to the other side behind the gunship.

"Damn it!" spat Coraline, turning away quickly and rushing to the other side of the compartment. "Help me get this side open…"

But before she could finish her own sentence, the entire gunship was caught as if by a sudden storm, and Coraline and Wybie were thrown to the floor as the gunship pitched, a new force clashing against the engines with the scream of tortured metal and clashing gears.

Pulling herself up, Coraline glimpsed the coatl behind the gunship. It had champed down on the tail fin with its massive jaws, and was jerking at it as a wolf with prey. The gunship screeched in protest, and trails of smoke spluttered from the side. From the inside, it was as if the whole world was hurling itself around your head, in a wild storm of motion that allowed for no footing or coherent thought.

"Maria! Get us…!" Wybie started, but, as was the trend, didn't get to finish. The coatl suddenly released the tail, scissoring its fanged grip as it peeled away and sending the tail fin falling free to the ground, sending the gunship into a sudden corkscrew in the air as Maria, still seated, fought to get it back under control.

"Come on, hell take you!" she screamed, pulling furiously at the controls, multiple displays before her hollering and flashing red. "Stabilise!"

Coraline looked around as she tried to pull herself while pushing away dizziness. She shot to one side, Wybie lurching after her, the pair looking upwards out of the side, and they saw the coatl weaving lazy circles in the air above the gunship, hunter's eyes watching them with a steady appraisal. Coraline saw that it was preparing to lunge down and finish the job.

"You take the other side!" she yelled at Wybie, motioning violently with her hand. "Shoot at it when it comes down!"

The coatl swept down just as she spoke, its jaws agape, sparks blazing from its eyes as it plunged towards the faltering gunship. A stream of bullets from the assault rifle flew up at it from one side of the ship, and spreads of blazing ferroshot from the other.

Halting briefly, the coatl hurled itself towards Wybie's side, to the bullets that were nothing more than an irritation. They rebounded off its feathered hide as it swept down and past the gunship, winding into the air beneath the gunship.

Wybie craned over, bracing himself against the door with one hand as he tried to track it. Coraline scanned her own side, and Maria looked behind her to the pair.

"What happened? Where's the …?"

And at the moment, the coatl struck, ramming itself into the bottom of the gunship with mountain-breaking force, crashing into Wybie's side and smashing the gunship askew to an angle just short of vertical. Wybie fell back with a cry of shock, which was abruptly cut off when he slammed into the wall on the other side of the gunship. Maria was nearly hurled out of her seat, and grabbed frantically for the controls, loathing the wrenching sound burbling from the much-abused engine.

Coraline was pitched right out the side.

* * *

><p>At first, there was the shock of impact, the moment where the coatl had struck home and knocked away the floor, where she had fallen free from her position and had just barely had time to realise that.<p>

Then there was a brief moment of weightlessness, when there was nothing but empty air and rushing wind on all sides, and the distant ground was just a pleasant image to be considered at leisure.

Then thought, accompanied by its bannermen of vertigo and panic, would come riding in a scant second later, and Coraline flailed and yelled at the top of her lungs as she snatched for a purchase, any purchase, anything that would prevent an inevitable and imminent introduction to the laws that covered unpleasant phrases like 'gravity', 'impact', and 'terminal velocity'.

Her outspread hand hit something, something which, when Coraline flicked her gaze up, identified itself as one of the lengths of tether-cord spilling out from the gunship's open side, one end weighted, the other end affixed to the ship.

Keeping her left hand locked in a deathly grip around the shotgun, the hand clinging to the tether began to twist and tug at it, desperately trying to secure it around the arm so that Coraline wouldn't slip off it as she and it continued falling through empty air.

For a few brief moments, the cord and Coraline were in freefall.

Then the cord snapped taught at its greatest extent, with the whip-crack of tense cord and another, quieter, sharper crack.

Coraline swayed like a pendulum at the end of the cord, her left hand still tightly gripping the shotgun, her right wrapped around by the cord. Something wasn't entirely right about the angle of her arm.

_Right_, she thought past the numb agony that grew as it insinuated itself down the arm and through her mind, _right. Okay. This could be a problem._

Above her, she saw as she tilted her head back, the coatl was circling the gunship in a casual spiral, watching it as the ruptured engines screamed with unsustainable effort. Maria was piloting for her very life, but it wasn't enough.

Angling its body once again, the coatl dove down through the sky, its car-sized head aimed as a battering ram right at the gunship.

Coraline pulled the shotgun up as far as she could, and, gritting her teeth and blinking away the pain, crooked the gun in one bent arm and sought for the trigger with her index finger.

The shot that rang out sent more shot scything through the air, several pellets of pure iron once again ripping across the coatl's side and sending it off-balance with the sudden pain. Hissing with pain, it missed the gunship and quickly pulled itself into a sharp downwards circle, aiming this time for Coraline.

With one huge heave on the swaying tether, and with one great wrench of pain from her broken arm, Coraline managed to swing to one side just as it came at her jaws agape, sending herself swaying to one side in the rush of air of its passage. The lurch of her movement coupled with the aftermath of the shot's recoil sent the shotgun falling from her grasp. With a startled curse, she grabbed futilely for it, and could only watch it fall to the empty ground.

_At least they'd gotten time to get the Ellipse evacuated_, she thought.

* * *

><p>Maria, sitting and sweating at the controls, jabbed at the controls once again while offering up a prayer.<p>

To her surprise and huge gratification, the engines crackled to one last burst of life. As she quickly reasserted control, Maria thought quickly.

Wybie was knocked out in the back, or was at least stunned. Coraline, as best as Maria could discern, was clinging by some miracle to a rope dangling from the gunship. The coatl was rising from where it had struck at Coraline.

For this moment, it was all down to Maria. And she took a gamble.

Seizing the stick, she swung the gunship to one side, aiming it right at the coatl. The coatl, seeing the gunship's headlong charge, answered by doing likewise, its eyes now pools of golden fury-filled fire.

It struck at the gunship as they closed … but Maria banked the gunship at the last possible second, and the spinning rotors atop the body collided square into the coatl's mouth with an otherworldly shriek of pain and the crash of colliding and sparking metal.

If it wasn't pure iron, then it would be hard-pressed to harm a psychephage, but it could certainly still hurt. The coatl corkscrewed away, hissing in agony, its body buckled and battered.

Maria exulted. Briefly.

The noise from the engines changed, from an unhappy gurgle to a full-throated screech of shredding metal. A short blast of heat rushed up from in front of her, singing her hair and eyebrows, and she stared wild-eyed at the controls.

She would be the last to call herself well-versed in controlling gunships of any description. Cars alone were a hassle to drive with her mind, with so many things needing to be learned and held in mind and to not be distracted from.

But Maria was pretty certain, and she would have put money on this, that small flames rushing up from the gaps in your controls was a pretty good indicator that not everything was as it should be in the gunship's engine.

And at that moment as well, the gunship started, quite innocuously, quite slowly at the start, to fall straight down, and gathered speed as it went.

Maria said, in a pointed and resigned and decidedly small-font tone, "_Fuck._"

Then she turned in her seat, twisting in the seat-harness, shouting "Wybie, prepare to bail! Wybie, are you awake?"

"Why are there fireworks in my skull?" came the unenthusiastic response.

"We're falling! When we get near the ground, jump!"

Wybie craned his head from his prone position, looking out at the rushing and increasingly tilting world.

"Holy hell, we're falling," he said at length.

"_You don't say_. Jump when we get near enough to the ground." Maria looked across the controls, scanning desperately for anything that looked useful.

Something rose in her vision, and when she looked out the front window, she saw Coraline trailing on a level with the gunship. One of her hands was occupied unwinding lengths of cord from around her other arm. She didn't seem to notice Maria as she worked, and when she looked up, it was only after she'd unwound the last loop of the tether, the cord and her blue hair flapping in the rush of air.

She gave Maria a weary thumbs-up. Then she let go of the cord for good and forced herself into a position akin to a skydiver.

Maria leaned forward, alarmed, and then relaxed slightly when she saw Coraline trying to angle herself towards the marquee at the centre of the Ellipse. From their current distance above the ground, and at her angle and speed, she could probably make it. She'd be able to cushion her fall.

Come to think of it, what was their height above the ground?

There was a Tarzan-esque yell from the back, and Maria turned to see Wybie jumping out the open side.

And then the world, quite suddenly and with no other warning, became a whirlwind of clashing noise and force and explosive pain.

* * *

><p>In the trees around the Ellipse, several of the braver media crews with still-functioning cameras still stood, struck mute with shock and awe, accompanied by many of the Secret Service agents who weren't attending to their stricken friends. They watched the impact of the gunship with an appalled silence.<p>

Once the first sounds had become echoes, three figures lay recumbent.

Coraline lay stunned in the remains of the marquee, some short distance from the downed gunship and from her fallen shotgun, her broken arm bent painfully beneath her.

Wybie tried to pull himself up from the ground, one of his ankles twisted, the breath driven out of him by his impact with the ground.

A long shadow grew across the lawn.

And in the smashed gunship, from which smoke trickled into the sky, Maria sat back in the pilot's seat and groaned.

The seat-harness and the seat itself had been designed to accommodate crash-landings of this nature, and Maria was still alive, awake, and relatively unharmed. Admittedly, her entire back from neck to waist was one huge mass of screaming whiplash, and her chest had been bruised by the harness, and the number of smaller scrapes and cuts defied counting, but all in all, those were relatively small things to worry about.

Heck, the one good thing about small worries was that you _could_ fret about them, that you could focus on them because of the absence of bigger worries…

The shadow grew, and hissed, and the grounding coatl reached out delicately with its jaws and ripped away the entire front window of the gunship.

Energy siphoned from elsewhere had healed the scars inflicted by the shotgun and eased the aches of the rotor-inflicted bruising. The coatl was somewhat irked by the persistence and resilience of its opponents in the sky-battle, and it was neither a good winner nor good loser. Its eyes blazed like the heart of the sun as it leaned in closer to Maria, who scrabbled for her pistol.

It drew its head and glistening fangs back, and a sudden voice to one side said "Hey, ugly."

The coatl turned, and saw Wybie standing, swaying slightly, holding the assault rifle. He smiled a grim smile before shoving the rifle into fully-automatic and opening wild fire.

The first shot rebounded off the coatl's face, making it reflexively screw its eyes shut edge back as the dented bullet fell back from its hide. The second and third bullets rebounded as well, and the coatl slowly opened its eyes as Wybie continued his fire.

Brass-jacketed bullets flashed, bouncing to the ground in small dented piles off the coatl's head and side and eyes, each part of it unharmed. It watched Wybie silently, watched the last spit-fire of a tracer round, and watched his face change as the gun _chunk_ed empty.

He pulled hopefully at the trigger a few more times, and then looked up to face the coatl with a nervous grin. The coatl tilted its head slightly.

"Yes?" said the coatl. "And what follows?"

"Er…" Wybie held the gun loosely. "Um. I didn't really plan ahead for this one."

The coatl blinked. Part of its simmering fury and endless pride had been replaced by simple bemusement. "Thine entire plan was to engage me with an entirely useless weapon and hope for the best?"

"When you put it like that…" said Wybie, as though the situation was perfectly normal.

The coat gave him a level stare. Then it jabbed forward with its head, ramming straight into Wybie, sending him flying several metres away with several loudly-snapped ribs, rendering him too shocked to scream as he sprawled on the ground.

"Enough," growled the coatl. "I have the field here. I shall have thine sovereign. I shall not let the antics of those barely evolved past imbecility dissuade me. Thou art _nothing_. _NOTHING!_"

As it reared its head to strike, one last voice came from behind it. "You do love the sound of your own voice, don't you?"

Startled, it spun, and saw Coraline Jones standing there, facing the coatl side-on, one foot extended and the other behind her at an angle. Her face was set with a grim resolve, her broken arm painfully supporting the raised shotgun.

"It's a problem. You should have worked on it," she said, her voice quiet, unyielding, and cold, as cold as the heart of hell itself.

The coatl struck out unthinkingly, the shotgun thundered, and the world fell apart in a storm of white fire.


	15. Renaissance

The world fell apart, and Coraline fell with it.

It was a gentle transition, a smooth sensation of weightlessness kicking just after the last conscious moments, just after the crack of thunder from the shotgun and the blurring form of the coatl and after a sharp pain that had suddenly been everywhere at once.

It was a formless and dream-like scape she found herself in, through which she was guided by nothing she could control but to which she put up no resistance.

Through chaos she spiralled, through tenuous parts of her mind she tumbled, through her past she fell. But not exactly _her_ past.

There were so many routes she could have taken, she realised and considered with what few pieces of consciousness could knit themselves together. So many paths her life could have taken, those which she could have taken and those over which she had no control.

Here, she saw herself walking to the old well, a big sister in tow who radiated equal parts exasperation and cheerfulness. There, she had a younger sister, an annoyance and joy both, or a younger brother, or an older brother, or any combinations of any siblings in any numbers. For many of the countless paths, her life returned to relative normality, and the Sur-real and the Beldam kept their distance. For others, they never left. For others, they claimed her.

Maria appeared in none, but Wybie appeared in so many of them, a constant and familiar presence. They went to school together, and became friends or something more (an idea to which Coraline wasn't entirely averse, and she cheered them on as she saw them).

In this one, he saved her once again from supernatural peril. In that one, she saved him from more natural peril. And in others, time and again, they faced the Beldam once more. The Beldam, and other beldams, and yet other supernatural terrors, and normal terrors. Pregnancy, loss, heartbreak, serial killers, the usual.

From where she drifted, they all had something to commend them. All of them rooted in other decisions, in other rolls of fate's dice, in things beyond the scope of her sight.

Something strangely tangible drew sharply at her. Consciousness grew, and as she realised where she was in her thoughts, it began to melt away. All these other paths drifted past her, other potentialities lost like clouds in the sky.

If she had chosen differently…

Tangibility struck.

But fate had worked out differently, and she had made her decisions. And she could live with that.

Heck, she'd been doing a good enough job of that at least.

And the world drew her out, piece by piece.

* * *

><p>A soft buzzing, which came as a piercing whine to Coraline's strained ears, filtered through the air. She coughed as her eyes peeled open, the world stitching itself together out of a blur.<p>

She lay in something soft, with a thin sheet covering her. The walls she could face were pale and sterile, and a woman in a white coat stood over her, taking notes on a clipboard. The doctor looked up as Coraline opened her eyes, and reached down gently to steady her.

"Careful, Secretary," she said, pitching her voice as softly as possible. "You've taken some hard knocks."

"Where am I?" said Coraline in a croak. "I was… fighting the coatl…?" The majority of her body was one huge ache, much of it encumbered by what could only be bandages.

"You were. You're now in Howard University Hospital, undergoing treatment for…" The doctor turned a page on her clipboard. "A broken arm, a dislocated shoulder, two broken ribs, a great deal of blunt trauma, and a linear skull fracture. Don't worry about that last one," she added quickly. "We detected no damage to your brain or associated neurological tissue. And the whole set's nothing that isn't being healed by injected nanites."

"You should have seen the other guy," managed Coraline, letting herself subside. "What about Wybie and Maria? My colleagues. What happened to…?"

"They took a beating, but to a lesser extent than you. They're making full recoveries."

"And how long…?"

"Two days, give or take an hour or two, if you're asking how long you've been out. Your arm, torso, and skull have been splinted and dressed, and the injected nanites should greatly accelerate your healing, so you should expect to make a full recovery in about two weeks." A machine to one side chirped, which drew the doctor's attention.

"What's that?" asked Coraline, shifting slightly.

"Your anabolic rate. It's coming up roses. I just need to pass that specific number to the room nurse," said the doctor, peeling away. "I won't be long. And I think your friends might want to see you."

"You mean…" started Coraline, pushing herself painfully up, and stopping as soon as two figures walked briskly past the leaving doctor.

Maria looked intact enough, barring several elastoplasts and a stiff neck brace. Wybie hobbled a little stiffly, the bulge of a body-splint evident under the torso of his hospital gown.

His entire face lit up when he saw Coraline, and he rushed forward to embrace her. She stretched with one arm to return the gesture, and both of them loudly yelped and winced when much-abused ribs were jarred together. But it was the thought that counted.

"Good to see you're okay," said Maria. "You look like death warmed up."

"You've always been such a charmer. Are you two okay? Nothing permanently damaged?"

"Nothing at all. Which is more than we can say for the coatl."

"What exactly happened? I blacked out."

"It hit you just as the gun fired," said Wybie, throwing himself into the chair by the hospital bed. "It got you in the upper body – just here – at the exact moment you pulled the trigger. You went flying, it got a mouthful of ferroshot, and the last we saw of it, it was literally being blown apart from the inside-out by fire." He winced at the memory. "They got medical teams out as quickly as they could, for us and for a couple of agents who were hurt badly. One of them's in the room over. I dropped in to say hi, but he was a bit too busy being unconscious to care much."

"And what about everyone else? Skirving? The President? Malinois?"

"I have no idea," said Wybie. "We haven't had much chance to find out. They've been keeping us pretty secluded."

"Why's that?"

"Well," said Maria, after a pause, "There was the small thing of us having a duel to the death via a gunship with a giant feathered serpent right over the White House. That sort of thing gets people's attention."

After another pause, Coraline said "Ah."

"Ah indeed. The first night, when I was lying awake, I could hear the press vans driving in front of the hospital at all hours." Maria sat down on the edge of the bed. "I think at the moment, as far as everyone's concerned, we're the most interesting government department around."

"And can you blame everyone?" said Wybie with the warm glow of satisfaction. "Look at what we just did."

Coraline looked out at the window, over which cream-coloured blinds were drawn. Light filtered past in even strips, over the floor and walls, over Wybie, over Maria, over her, over the entire department.

"Look at what we're going to do," she said in a soft murmur.

* * *

><p>Word got back to Coraline the day after.<p>

The incident on the Ellipse was still under official investigation, and the dissolution of the Department of the Supernatural had been suspended given the circumstances. Kuciyela was unhurt and still working, and he sent his best regards to those still recovering. The press and public over the world were having conniptions. A dozen major religions were either claiming valediction or angrily denying the events. Approximately several thousand freedom-of-information requests had been filed against the Department of the Supernatural. Sayid was practically under home siege by the press, but was doing quite alright, thank you, and could they give him a call as soon as possible to let him know when business as normal would resume?

Malinois had been found dead in the military compound in Maryland, his form almost desiccated and the feathers embedded in his chest gleaming with a sick and hungry light. Video footage from security cameras showed his entire conversation with the department, as well as his sudden collapse at around the same time as the coatl was injured during the fight.

There were also the minor matters of breaking and entering into a federal building, causing a disturbance, assault and battery, and theft of a government gunship.

In the light of recent events, a presidential pardon would end up being in order.

* * *

><p>The day after that, the department got another visitor.<p>

They were gathered in Coraline's room, when a call came from the doctor, asking if it was okay that they received such a visitor.

Coraline said yes, and a moment later, Skirving stepped through.

Shorn of the circumstances, and judging only by his face, one could only have supposed that the man was undergoing an unanaesthetised and involuntary circumcision. But he soldiered on, and stood before the trio.

"I have a message from the President and Congress," he said, each word a labour. "They wish to send their best wishes that you make a quick recovery, and commend you for your actions on the first of April. There has been talk of medals and official thanks."

"In addition," he said, pressing on before any of them could speak, "It is generally recognised and regretted that the resources allocated to your department were woefully inadequate for your duty, and measures have been put in place to increase your budget. Hopefully, this'll let you expand your department and let it carry on its work."

Coraline opened her mouth to speak, Maria to gasp, and Wybie to gape, but Skirving beat them all to the draw. "And I … I would like to offer my personal apologies to you. To all of you. I have, in good faith, underestimated the importance of your duties and the reality of your situation. I can only try and redress this."

Coraline looked in Skirving's eyes, and knew that it wasn't a bad man who looked back out at her. As much as it pained him to admit he was wrong, it would pain him even more to continue being wrong. And she would have betted that he'd volunteered for delivering that message.

They would likely never get along. But there was no rule that said you had to like those who did good. In this case, that would cut both ways.

"Apology accepted, Mr Skirving" she said, and then decided to make certain that this particular hatchet was buried as far as it could go. "And thank you."

"Your affairs will, of course, still be subject to the same scrutiny as any other department," he said, because there was such a thing as suspending the universe's disbelief for too long. "Complacency and carelessness are to be avoided, Secretary Jones. Now more than ever."

"Taking care? It's as you don't know us as all, Mr Skirving," said Maria.

He left them in peace.

And for the rest of the day, though she knew it was somewhat petty, Coraline couldn't resist laughing.

* * *

><p>And on the first of May, the afternoon found Maria sitting beside the fully employed Under Secretary Sayid, along with a host of others in the meeting room of the Thaddeus Complex.<p>

The others there included notable philosophers, biologists, government representatives, spokespeople for animal ethics, a Justice of the Supreme Court. And Tripod and two other cats at one end of the table, within the shifting field of the Eroder.

"Shall we get this committee started?" said Maria. "Nothing will be settled here, but it should help us begin to address a few key issues that were raised recently."

"Yes, the effects of the Eroder," said the Justice cautiously. "Regarding manifested … ah … intelligence and sapience."

"We did wonder when you'd get round to asking us for a few pointers," said Tripod.

* * *

><p>And in a secure laboratory elsewhere in the building, Wybie stood with roughly a dozen others, all of them wearing labcoats and watching the centre of the room, on which another Eroder had been assembled, with great interest.<p>

Wybie dropped to one knee, and regarded the creature in the Eroder's area with interest. It shied back slightly, a sinewy, scrawny thing of ochre-red skin stretched over thin bone and corded muscle, with pale eyes made translucent with alarm. It bared a mouth of bristling teeth uncertainly.

"What the _Kzcarzcine_ is this?" inquired the wendigo. "What are you?"

"Good day," said Wybie. "I'm Wybourne Lovat, of the United States Department of the Supernatural. The ladies and gentlemen with me are interested in the research I've been doing with the Sur-real, and they'd like to ask you a few questions."

The wendigo stared blankly, completely thrown by the situation. Then it glanced around, sniffed at the air, and with one smooth tug at the air, seemed to rip itself out of space altogether via a quickly opening-and-closing door of light.

"Perhaps a different approach is in order," said a man at the front.

"Saying 'please' might do it," said Wybie, watching the dancing dust particles in the disturbed air, at the change left in the psychephage's wake.

* * *

><p>And in southeast Atlanta, just beyond a little door and just beyond rational physics, a monster tried to draw a child closer.<p>

It stood at a kitchen counter, a woman of average proportions, with dark curled hair, dark skin, and a wide smile made uncanny by two glinting copper buttons in place of eyes. She held a mixing bowl and a whisk in her hands.

The boy, still in his pyjamas, stood in the kitchen doorway, looking uncertain. In one hand, he held a small doll in his image.

"Aren't you hungry, dear?" asked the button-eyed mother. "It's your favourite."

"Hang on," said the boy, "I've heard of this on the TV."

The Other Mother paused, nonplussed.

"Now I remember," said the boy with some triumph. "The lady who fought that monster at the White House spoke about it on the Latest Show, that there's other monsters who pretend they're your mother, only they're not your mother, and they've got buttons in place of eyes, like you, and that they'll try and sew buttons into _your_ eyes, which is so many kinds of gross…"

By now, the beldam's gaze was decidedly glazed over.

"…and that we should stay away from them and find an adult, and call the police, and that she'll hear about it and come and kick your ass, and that's basically it all, I think. So no, I'm not hungry." The boy paused, and tossed the doll from hand to hand.

"Why would you even want to put buttons in my eyes anyway?" he asked, after an awkward silence.

"Ghhra_arrrrgh_!" the beldam suddenly screeched, ripping her way out of her form's blouse and slacks, her body twisting and elongating and her mouth sickeningly protruding in a wolfish snarl, her hands deforming into skeletal claws. The boy screamed and hastily stepped back as she prowled forward. "You little unwanted _runt_. Do you really want to see the reason? Then merely…"

There was a noise from the doorway from whence the boy had come, diverting their attention.

There was a shadow that detached from the rest, and caught the light as it turned into a woman with shoulder-length blue hair, a heavy dark trenchcoat, and a peaked cap. She bore a polished shotgun, which she held levelled below a pair of hazel eyes.

"Get behind me, kid," said Coraline Jones, inwardly rejoicing at her timing while the kid did as he was told and the beldam was brought up short.

"Shrieking hells," whispered the beldam. "It's _you_."

"No other," said Coraline, ushering the kid to get out through the door. "Now, I have a few questions."

* * *

><p><strong>Author's Afterthoughts:<strong>

**Another one down and dusted.**

**Once again, I'd like to thank everyone who read this, or reviewed it, or whatevered this while I was writing it. You know who you are, and if you don't know who you are, try asking someone nearby who looks trustworthy. They'll get you to someone who can help.**

**This still isn't the end of this particular storyline. At some point in the not-too-distant future, I plan on finishing a oneshot interquel, set between the events of 'Wells Street Station' and 'The Ellipse', currently entitled 'Promenade'.**

**And some time after _that_, I'll start the third and final part of this series, currently entitled 'Narodnoya'. I hope to see you then.**

**- Marquis Carabas, signing off.**


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